Symbolic Reasoning Symbolic AI and Machine Learning Pathmind

A. Symbolic AI, also known as classical or rule-based AI, is an approach that represents knowledge using explicit symbols and rules. It emphasizes logical reasoning, manipulating symbols, and making inferences based on predefined rules. Symbolic AI is typically rule-driven and uses symbolic representations for problem-solving.Neural AI, on the other hand, refers to artificial intelligence models based on neural networks, which are computational models inspired by the human brain.

Pushing performance for NLP systems will likely be akin to augmenting deep neural networks with logical reasoning capabilities. For almost any type of programming outside of statistical learning algorithms, symbolic processing is used; consequently, it is in some way a necessary part of every AI system. Indeed, Seddiqi said he finds it’s often easier to program a few logical rules to implement some function than to deduce them with machine learning.

Resources for Deep Learning and Symbolic Reasoning

The problem is that training data or the necessary labels aren’t always available. This is why many forward-leaning companies are scaling back on single-model AI deployments in favor of a hybrid approach, particularly for the most complex problem that AI tries to address – natural language understanding (NLU). Hadayat Seddiqi, director of machine learning at InCloudCounsel, a legal technology company, said the time is right for developing a neuro-symbolic learning approach.

While a large part of Data Science relies on statistics and applies statistical approaches to AI, there is an increasing potential for successfully applying symbolic approaches as well. Here we discuss the role symbolic representations and inference can play in Data Science, highlight the research challenges from the perspective of the data scientist, and argue that symbolic methods should become a crucial component of the data scientists’ toolbox. We investigate an unconventional direction of research that aims at converting neural networks, a class of distributed, connectionist, sub-symbolic models into a symbolic level with the ultimate goal of achieving AI interpretability and safety. To that end, we propose Object-Oriented Deep Learning, a novel computational paradigm of deep learning that adopts interpretable “objects/symbols” as a basic representational atom instead of N-dimensional tensors (as in traditional “feature-oriented” deep learning).

Their arguments are based on a need to address the two kinds of thinking discussed in Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman describes human thinking as having two components, System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the kind used for pattern recognition while System 2 is far better suited for planning, deduction, and deliberative thinking.

Situated robotics: the world as a model

Most six-year-olds ae able to dress themselves and can likely even tie their own shoes. They can perform complex tasks requiring manual dexterity using a variety of different materials, and can handle animals and even younger siblings. The key concept is the use of symbols and the encoding of Sidebar knowledge of the world through relationships between these symbols. One familiar example is the knowledge that a German shepherd is a dog, which is a mammal; all mammals are warm-blooded; therefore, a German shepherd should be warm-blooded. There is plenty more to understand about explainability though, so let’s explore how it works in the most common AI models. Business executives have notoriously struggled to assess the business value of AI.

• In a certain sense, every abstract category, like chair, asserts an analogy between all the disparate objects called chairs, and we transfer our knowledge about one chair to another with the help of the symbol.
• Children can be symbol manipulation and do addition/subtraction, but they don’t really understand what they are doing.
• In case of a failure, managers invest substantial amounts of time and money breaking the models down and running deep-dive analytics to see exactly what went wrong.
• For instance, if you take a picture of your cat from a somewhat different angle, the program will fail.
• Furthermore, many empirical laws cannot simply be derived from data because they are idealizations that are never actually observed in nature; examples of such laws include Galileo’s principle of inertia, Boyle’s gas Law, zero-gravity, point mass, friction-less motion, etc. [49].

As soon as you generalize the problem, there will be an explosion of new rules to add (remember the cat detection problem?), which will require more human labor. Symbolic AI involves the explicit embedding of human knowledge and behavior rules into computer programs. But in recent years, as neural networks, also known as connectionist AI, gained traction, symbolic AI has fallen by the wayside. That is certainly not the case with unaided machine learning models, as training data usually pertains to a specific problem. When another comes up, even if it has some elements in common with the first one, you have to start from scratch with a new model. These model-based techniques are not only cost-prohibitive, but also require hard-to-find data scientists to build models from scratch for specific use cases like cognitive processing automation (CPA).

Hybrid System Explainability

Data Science studies all steps of the data life cycle to tackle specific and general problems across the whole data landscape. Opposing Chomsky’s views that a human is born with Universal Grammar, a kind of knowledge, John Locke[1632–1704] postulated that mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa. The grandfather of AI, Thomas Hobbes said — Thinking is manipulation of symbols and Reasoning is computation. Imagine how Turbotax manages to reflect the US tax code – you tell it how much you earned and how many dependents you have and other contingencies, and it computes the tax you owe by law – that’s an expert system. Similar axioms would be required for other domain actions to specify what did not change.

• In pursuit of efficient and robust generalization, we introduce the Schema Network, an object-oriented generative physics simulator capable of disentangling multiple causes of events and reasoning backward through causes to achieve goals.
• Opposing Chomsky’s views that a human is born with Universal Grammar, a kind of knowledge, John Locke[1632–1704] postulated that mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa.
• 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.
• Although challenges exist, the potential for growth through informed, sentiment-driven strategies remains undeniable.

Eight-year-olds can hold their own beliefs, desires, and intentions, explaining them to others and understanding when others explain theirs. They can infer other people’s desires and intents from their actions and understand why they have those desires and intents. We don’t explain our desires and intents to children because we expect them to understand what they are observing. GPS, combined with capabilities such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), has made good progress in this field. Projecting actions through imagined physical spaces, however, is not far advanced when compared with the current capabilities of video games. Years of work are still required to make robust systems that can be used with no human priming.

Symbolic artificial intelligence showed early progress at the dawn of AI and computing. You can easily visualize the logic of rule-based programs, communicate them, and troubleshoot them. Using OOP, you can create extensive and complex symbolic AI programs that perform various tasks. Although the AI community is active in research to address all these aspects, we are likely decades away from achieving some of them.

The DSN model provides a simple, universal yet powerful structure, similar to DNN, to represent any knowledge of the world, which is transparent to humans. The conjecture behind the DSN model is that any type of real world objects sharing enough common features are mapped into human brains as a symbol. Those symbols are connected by links, representing the composition, correlation, causality, or other relationships between them, forming a deep, hierarchical symbolic network structure. Powered by such a structure, the DSN model is expected to learn like humans, because of its unique characteristics. Second, it can learn symbols from the world and construct the deep symbolic networks automatically, by utilizing the fact that real world objects have been naturally separated by singularities.

The second AI summer: knowledge is power, 1978–1987

Expert systems are monotonic; that is, the more rules you add, the more knowledge is encoded in the system, but additional rules can’t undo old knowledge. Monotonic basically means one direction; i.e. when one thing goes up, another thing goes up. The two biggest flaws of deep learning are its lack of model interpretability (i.e. why did my model make that prediction?) and the large amount of data that deep neural networks require in order to learn. Similar to the problems in handling dynamic domains, common-sense reasoning is also difficult to capture in formal reasoning. Examples of common-sense reasoning include implicit reasoning about how people think or general knowledge of day-to-day events, objects, and living creatures. Overall, LNNs is an important component of neuro-symbolic AI, as they provide a way to integrate the strengths of both neural networks and symbolic reasoning in a single, hybrid architecture.

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. A symbolic approach also offers a higher level of accuracy out of the box by assigning a meaning to each word based on the context and embedded knowledge. This is process is called  disambiguation and it a key component of the best NLP/NLU models.

Intel Establishes Articul8 AI Generative Artificial Intelligence Firm

In fact, rule-based AI systems are still very important in today’s applications. Many leading scientists believe that symbolic reasoning will continue to remain a very important component of artificial intelligence. Also, some tasks can’t be translated to direct rules, including speech recognition and natural language processing. OOP languages allow you to define classes, specify their properties, and organize them in hierarchies. You can create instances of these classes (called objects) and manipulate their properties. Class instances can also perform actions, also known as functions, methods, or procedures.

And it is likely that such bonding is only going to happen if they look like us. Here, we discuss current research that combines methods from Data Science and symbolic AI, outline future directions and limitations. In Section 5, we state our main conclusions and future vision, and we aim to explore a limitation in discovering scientific knowledge in a data-driven way and outline ways to overcome this limitation.

However, hybrid approaches are increasingly merging symbolic AI and Deep Learning. The goal is balancing the weaknesses and problems of the one with the benefits of the other – be it the aforementioned “gut feeling” or the enormous computing power required. Apart from niche applications, it is more and more difficult to equate complex contemporary AI systems to one approach or the other. And unlike symbolic AI, neural networks have no notion of symbols and hierarchical representation of knowledge. This limitation makes it very hard to apply neural networks to tasks that require logic and reasoning, such as science and high-school math.

While symbolic models aim for complicated connections, they are good at capturing compositional and causal structures. Of course, this technology is not only found in AI software, but for instance also at the checkout of an online shop (“credit card or invoice” – “delivery to Germany or the EU”). However, simple AI problems can be easily solved by decision trees (often in combination with table-based agents).

Read more about Symbolic and use cases here.