Neurons and Symbols: A Manifesto

We discuss the purpose of neural-symbolic integration including its principles, mechanisms and applications. We outline a cognitive computational model for neural-symbolic integration, position the model in the broader context of multi-agent systems, machine learning and automated reasoning, and list some of the challenges for the area of neural-symbolic computation to achieve the promise of effective integration of robust learning and expressive reasoning under uncertainty

A Semantic Framework for Neural-Symbolic Computing

Two approaches to AI, neural networks and symbolic systems, have been proven very successful for an array of AI problems. However, neither has been able to achieve the general reasoning ability required for human-like intelligence. It has been argued that this is due to inherent weaknesses in each approach. Luckily, these weaknesses appear to be complementary, with symbolic systems being adept at the kinds of things neural networks have trouble with and vice-versa. The field of neural-symbolic AI attempts to exploit this asymmetry by combining neural networks and symbolic AI into integrated systems. Often this has been done by encoding symbolic knowledge into neural networks. Unfortunately, although many different methods for this have been proposed, there is no common definition of an encoding to compare them. We seek to rectify this problem by introducing a semantic framework for neural-symbolic AI, which is then shown to be general enough to account for a large family of neural-symbolic systems. We provide a number of examples and proofs of the application of the framework to the neural encoding of various forms of knowledge representation and neural network. These, at first sight disparate approaches, are all shown to fall within the framework's formal definition of what we call semantic encoding for neural-symbolic AI

Relational Knowledge Extraction from Attribute-Value Learners

Bottom Clause Propositionalization (BCP) is a recent propositionalization method which allows fast relational learning. Propositional learners can use BCP to obtain accuracy results comparable with Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) learners. However, differently from ILP learners, what has been learned cannot normally be represented in first-order logic. In this paper, we propose an approach and introduce a novel algorithm for extraction of first-order rules from propositional rule learners, when dealing with data propositionalized with BCP. A theorem then shows that the extracted first-order rules are consistent with their propositional version. The algorithm was evaluated using the rule learner RIPPER, although it can be applied on any propositional rule learner. Initial results show that the accuracies of both RIPPER and the extracted first-order rules can be comparable to those obtained by Aleph (a traditional ILP system), but our approach is considerably faster (obtaining speed-ups of over an order of magnitude), generating a compact rule set with at least the same representation power as standard ILP learners