Intelligent systems based on first-order logic on the one hand, and on
artificial neural networks (also called connectionist systems) on the other,
differ substantially. It would be very desirable to combine the robust neural
networking machinery with symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning
paradigms like logic programming in such a way that the strengths of either
paradigm will be retained. Current state-of-the-art research, however, fails by
far to achieve this ultimate goal. As one of the main obstacles to be overcome
we perceive the question how symbolic knowledge can be encoded by means of
connectionist systems: Satisfactory answers to this will naturally lead the way
to knowledge extraction algorithms and to integrated neural-symbolic systems.Comment: In Proceedings of INFORMATION'2004, Tokyo, Japan, to appear. 12 page
