Making AI Meaningful Again

Artificial intelligence (AI) research enjoyed an initial period of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s. But this enthusiasm was tempered by a long interlude of frustration when genuinely useful AI applications failed to be forthcoming. Today, we are experiencing once again a period of enthusiasm, fired above all by the successes of the technology of deep neural networks or deep machine learning. In this paper we draw attention to what we take to be serious problems underlying current views of artificial intelligence encouraged by these successes, especially in the domain of language processing. We then show an alternative approach to language-centric AI, in which we identify a role for philosophy

A Short Survey on Deep Learning for Multimodal Integration: Applications, Future Perspectives and Challenges

Deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performances in several research applications nowadays: from computer vision to bioinformatics, from object detection to image generation. In the context of such newly developed deep-learning approaches, we can define the concept of multimodality. The objective of this research field is to implement methodologies which can use several modalities as input features to perform predictions. In this, there is a strong analogy with respect to what happens with human cognition, since we rely on several different senses to make decisions. In this article, we present a short survey on multimodal integration using deep-learning methods. In a first instance, we comprehensively review the concept of multimodality, describing it from a two-dimensional perspective. First, we provide, in fact, a taxonomical description of the multimodality concept. Secondly, we define the second multimodality dimension as the one describing the fusion approaches in multimodal deep learning. Eventually, we describe four applications of multimodal deep learning to the following fields of research: speech recognition, sentiment analysis, forensic applications and image processing

Modular Design Patterns for Hybrid Learning and Reasoning Systems: a taxonomy, patterns and use cases

The unification of statistical (data-driven) and symbolic (knowledge-driven) methods is widely recognised as one of the key challenges of modern AI. Recent years have seen large number of publications on such hybrid neuro-symbolic AI systems. That rapidly growing literature is highly diverse and mostly empirical, and is lacking a unifying view of the large variety of these hybrid systems. In this paper we analyse a large body of recent literature and we propose a set of modular design patterns for such hybrid, neuro-symbolic systems. We are able to describe the architecture of a very large number of hybrid systems by composing only a small set of elementary patterns as building blocks. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) a taxonomically organised vocabulary to describe both processes and data structures used in hybrid systems; 2) a set of 15+ design patterns for hybrid AI systems, organised in a set of elementary patterns and a set of compositional patterns; 3) an application of these design patterns in two realistic use-cases for hybrid AI systems. Our patterns reveal similarities between systems that were not recognised until now. Finally, our design patterns extend and refine Kautz' earlier attempt at categorising neuro-symbolic architectures.Comment: 20 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in the International Journal of Applied Intelligenc