What Is Neuro-Symbolic AI And Why Are Researchers Gushing Over It?

Symbolic AI and Data Science have been largely disconnected disciplines. Data Science generally relies on raw, continuous inputs, uses statistical methods to produce associations that need to be interpreted with respect to assumptions contained in background knowledge of the data analyst. Symbolic AI uses knowledge (axioms or facts) as input, relies on discrete structures, and produces knowledge that can be directly interpreted. The intersection of Data Science and symbolic AI will open up exciting new research directions with the aim to build knowledge-based, automated methods for scientific discovery.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a large portion of the funding for AI went into developing automated computer systems for translation of human languages, such as from Russian into English. The most famous remains the Turing Test, in which a human judge interacts, sight unseen, with both humans and a machine, and must try and guess which is which. Two others, Ben Goertzel’s Robot College Student Test and Nils J. Nilsson’s Employment Test, seek to practically test an A.I.’s abilities by seeing whether it could earn a college degree or carry out workplace jobs. Another, which I should personally love to discount, posits that intelligence may be measured by the successful ability to assemble Ikea-style flatpack furniture without problems. For the enterprise, the bottom line for AI is how well it improves the business model. While there are many success stories detailing the way AI has helped automate processes, streamline workflows and otherwise boost productivity and profitability, the fact is that a vast majority of AI projects fail.

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Sometimes, the challenge that a data scientist faces is the lack of data such as in the rare disease field. In these cases, the combination of methods from Data Science with symbolic representations that provide background information is already successfully being applied [9,27]. Despite its propensity for underpinning everything from computer vision to certain varieties of Natural Language Processing, machine learning is only one branch of AI. Its statistical capacity operates much better when coupled with AI’s knowledge base that involves semantic inferencing, knowledge graphs, descriptive ontologies, and more. Machine learning alone—particularly when only manifest as supervised learning—isn’t enough to handle sophisticated question answering and natural language technology applications at enterprise scale, speed, and affordability.

Further, our method allows easy generalization to new object attributes, compositions, language concepts, scenes and questions, and even new program domains. It also empowers applications including visual question answering and bidirectional image-text retrieval. Interweaving unsupervised and supervised learning techniques with symbolic reasoning allows organizations to represent the knowledge necessary to understand their text without building taxonomies beforehand or paying to label datasets. Implicit to this process is “taking the best of both worlds from the semantic technologies and the machine learning technologies and getting rid of the limitations of each,” Welsh noted.

The benefits and limits of symbolic AI

McCarthy’s approach to fix the frame problem was circumscription, a kind of non-monotonic logic where deductions could be made from actions that need only specify what would change while not having to explicitly specify everything that would not change. Other non-monotonic logics provided truth maintenance systems that revised beliefs leading to contradictions. Limitations were discovered in using simple first-order logic to reason about dynamic domains. Problems were discovered both with regards to enumerating the preconditions for an action to succeed and in providing axioms for what did not change after an action was performed.

Research in this particular field has enabled us to create neural networks in the form of artificial intelligence. Symbolic AI was also seriously successful in the field of NLP systems. We can leverage Symbolic AI programs to encapsulate the semantics of a particular language through logical rules, thus helping with language comprehension. This property makes Symbolic AI an exciting contender for chatbot applications. Symbolical linguistic representation is also the secret behind some intelligent voice assistants. These smart assistants leverage Symbolic AI to structure sentences by placing nouns, verbs, and other linguistic properties in their correct place to ensure proper grammatical syntax and semantic execution.

With a hybrid approach featuring symbolic AI, the cost of AI goes down while the efficacy goes up, and even when it fails, there is a ready means to learn from that failure and turn it into success quickly. This is why a human can understand the urgency of an event during an accident or red lights, but a self-driving car won’t have the ability to do the same with only 80 percent capabilities. Neuro Symbolic AI will be able to manage these particular situations by training itself for higher accuracy with little data.

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It is therefore natural to ask how neural and symbolic approaches can be combined or even unified in order to overcome the weaknesses of either approach. Traditionally, in neuro-symbolic AI research, emphasis is on either incorporating symbolic abilities in a neural approach, or coupling neural and symbolic components such that they seamlessly interact [2]. Recently, there has been a great success in pattern recognition and unsupervised feature learning using neural networks [39]. This problem is closely related to the symbol grounding problem, i.e., the problem of how symbols obtain their meaning [24]. Feature learning methods using neural networks rely on distributed representations [26] which encode regularities within a domain implicitly and can be used to identify instances of a pattern in data.

Alessandro joined Bosch Corporate Research in 2016, after working as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. At Bosch, he focuses on neuro-symbolic reasoning for decision support systems. Alessandro’s primary interest is to investigate how semantic resources can be integrated with data-driven algorithms, and help humans and machines make sense of the physical and digital worlds.

This target requires that we also define the syntax and semantics of our domain through predicate logic. Implicit knowledge refers to information gained unintentionally and usually without being aware. Therefore, implicit knowledge tends to be more ambiguous to explain or formalize. Examples of implicit human knowledge include learning to ride a bike or to swim. Note that implicit knowledge can eventually be formalized and structured to become explicit knowledge. For example, if learning to ride a bike is implicit knowledge, writing a step-by-step guide on how to ride a bike becomes explicit knowledge.

Due to these limitations, researchers are trying to look for new avenues by uniting symbolic artificial intelligence techniques and neural networks. The power of neural networks is that they help automate the process of generating models of the world. This has led to several significant milestones in artificial intelligence, giving rise to deep learning models that, for example, could beat humans in progressively complex games, including Go and StarCraft. But it can be challenging to reuse these deep learning models or extend them to new domains. Not all data that a data scientist will be faced with consists of raw, unstructured measurements.

Symbolic AI is strengthening NLU/NLP with greater flexibility, ease, and accuracy — and it particularly excels in a hybrid approach. As a result, insights and applications are now possible that were unimaginable not so long ago. The ability to cull unstructured language data and turn it into actionable insights benefits nearly every industry, and technologies such as symbolic AI are making it happen. For obvious reasons, the US military and intelligence community was greatly interested in this area.

Expert Systems, an application of Symbolic AI, emerged as a solution to the knowledge bottleneck. Developed in the 1970s and 1980s, Expert Systems aimed to capture the expertise of human specialists in specific domains. Instead of encoding explicit rules, Expert Systems utilized a knowledge base containing facts and heuristics to draw conclusions and make informed decisions. Insofar as computers suffered from the same chokepoints, their builders relied on all-too-human hacks like symbols to sidestep the limits to processing, storage and I/O. As computational capacities grow, the way we digitize and process our analog reality can also expand, until we are juggling billion-parameter tensors instead of seven-character strings.

Moreover, Symbolic AI allows the intelligent assistant to make decisions regarding the speech duration and other features, such as intonation when reading the feedback to the user. Modern dialog systems (such as ChatGPT) rely on end-to-end deep learning frameworks and do not depend much on Symbolic AI. Similar logical processing is also utilized in search engines to structure the user’s prompt and the semantic web domain. The premise behind Symbolic AI is using symbols to solve a specific task. In Symbolic AI, we formalize everything we know about our problem as symbolic rules and feed it to the AI.

The Chinese Room experiment showed that it’s possible for a symbolic AI machine to instead of learning what Chinese characters mean, simply formulate which Chinese characters to output when asked particular questions by an evaluator. The first framework for cognition is symbolic AI, which is the approach based on assuming that intelligence can be achieved by the manipulation of symbols, through rules and logic operating on those symbols. The second framework is connectionism, the approach that intelligent thought can be derived from weighted combinations of activations of simple neuron-like processing units. Knowledge representation and formalization are firmly based on the categorization of various types of symbols. Using a simple statement as an example, we discussed the fundamental steps required to develop a symbolic program.

• This processing power enabled Symbolic AI systems to take over manually exhaustive and mundane tasks quickly.
• Since the representations and rules are explicitly defined, it is possible to understand and explain the reasoning process of the AI system.
• It asserts that symbols that stand for things in the world are the core building blocks of cognition.
• Generating a new, more comprehensive, scientific theory, i.e., the principle of inertia, is a creative process, with the additional difficulty that not a single instance of that theory could have been observed (because we know of no objects on which no force acts).
• As previously discussed, the machine does not necessarily understand the different symbols and relations.

It’s a combination of two existing approaches to building thinking machines; ones which were once pitted against each as mortal enemies. Cory is a lead research scientist at Bosch Research and Technology Center with a focus on applying knowledge representation and semantic technology to enable autonomous driving. Prior to joining Bosch, he earned a PhD in Computer Science from WSU, where he worked at the Kno.e.sis Center applying semantic technologies to represent and manage sensor data on the Web. In the context of autonomous driving, knowledge completion with KGEs can be used to predict entities in driving scenes that may have been missed by purely data-driven techniques. For example, consider the scenario of an autonomous vehicle driving through a residential neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. Its perception module detects and recognizes a ball bouncing on the road.

• For example, researchers predicted that deep neural networks would eventually be used for autonomous image recognition and natural language processing as early as the 1980s.
• Major applications of these approaches are link prediction (i.e., predicting missing edges between the entities in a knowledge graph), clustering, or similarity-based analysis and recommendation.
• One of the keys to symbolic AI’s success is the way it functions within a rules-based environment.
• For reasons I hope to make clear, the fundamental limits of AI relative to human intelligence have never changed, and will persist at least as long as AI is confined to digital technology and algorithm-based procedures (equivalent to a Turing machine).
• The weakness of symbolic reasoning is that it does not tolerate ambiguity as seen in the real world.

But for the moment, symbolic AI is the leading method to deal with problems that require logical thinking and knowledge representation. Deep neural networks are also very suitable for reinforcement learning, AI models that develop their behavior through numerous trial and error. Natural language processing focuses on treating language as data to perform tasks such as identifying topics without necessarily understanding the intended meaning. Natural language understanding, in contrast, constructs a meaning representation and uses that for further processing, such as answering questions. At the height of the AI boom, companies such as Symbolics, LMI, and Texas Instruments were selling LISP machines specifically targeted to accelerate the development of AI applications and research. In addition, several artificial intelligence companies, such as Teknowledge and Inference Corporation, were selling expert system shells, training, and consulting to corporations.

Intelligent machines can help to collect, store, search, process and reason over both data and knowledge. For a long time, a dominant approach to AI was based on symbolic representations and treating “intelligence” or intelligent behavior primarily as symbol manipulation. In a physical symbol system [46], entities called symbols (or tokens) are physical patterns that stand for, or denote, information from the external environment. Symbols can be combined to form complex symbol structures, and symbols can be manipulated by processes. Arguably, human communication occurs through symbols (words and sentences), and human thought – on a cognitive level – also occurs symbolically, so that symbolic AI resembles human cognitive behavior.

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