Perspectives of Neural-Symbolic Integration

The human brain possesses the remarkable capability of understanding, interpreting, and producing language, structures, and logic. Unlike their biological counterparts, artificial neural networks do not form such a close liason with symbolic reasoning: logic-based inference mechanisms and statistical machine learning constitute two major and very different paradigms in artificial intelligence with complementary strengths and weaknesses. Modern application scenarios in robotics, bioinformatics, language processing, etc., however require both the efficiency and noise-tolerance of statistical models and the generalization ability and high-level modelling of structural inference meachanisms. A variety of approaches has therefore been proposed for combining the two paradigms.This carefully edited volume contains state-of-the-art contributions in neural-symbolic integration, covering `loose' coupling by means of structure kernels or recursive models as well as `strong' coupling of logic and neural networks. It brings together a representative selection of results presented by some of the top researchers in the field, covering theoretical foundations, algorithmic design, and state-of-the-art applications in robotics and bioinformatics.