How neuro-symbolic AI might finally make machines reason like humans

The Various Types of Artificial Intelligence Technologies by Marie Stephen Leo Towards AI

symbolic ai example

There is currently no automated support for identifying competing scientific theories within a domain, determine in which aspects they agree and disagree, and evaluate the research data that supports them. We might teach the program rules that might eventually become irrelevant or even invalid, especially in highly volatile applications such as human behavior, where past behavior is not necessarily guaranteed. Even if the AI can learn these new logical rules, the new rules would sit on top of the older (potentially invalid) rules due to their monotonic nature. As a result, most Symbolic AI paradigms would require completely remodeling their knowledge base to eliminate outdated knowledge. For this reason, Symbolic AI systems are limited in updating their knowledge and have trouble making sense of unstructured data.

symbolic ai example

Operations are executed using the Symbol object’s value attribute, which contains the original data type converted into a string representation and sent to the engine for processing. As a result, all values are represented as strings, requiring custom objects to define a suitable __str__ method for conversion while preserving the object’s semantics. Similar to word2vec, we aim to perform contextualized operations on different symbols. However, as opposed to operating in vector space, we work in the natural language domain. This provides us the ability to perform arithmetic on words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., and verify the results in a human-readable format. As long as our goals can be expressed through natural language, LLMs can be used for neuro-symbolic computations.

Supplementary data

Once symbolic AI is introduced into business processes, the black box of AI is open, so to speak, allowing users to understand why machines act a certain way and what can be done to change that behaviour to get more desirable results. Additionally, this high visibility would allow operators to persistently monitor their processes, so that they can be further optimised and simplified. Every business, company and enterprise must now embrace hybrid AI – because where organisations were previously throwing just one form of AI at a problem (with its limited toolsets), they can now utilise multiple, varying approaches. He/she may ask other questions as well such as the location and time of the concert. All this is taken into consideration when we prepare the knowledge graph. Next, the prospect may ask about ticket availability, whether the ticket has any specific categories (single, couple, adult, senior) or ticket classes (front row, standing area, VIP lounge) – which will also be considered when developing the knowledge graph.

The deep learning hope—seemingly grounded not so much in science, but in a sort of historical grudge—is that intelligent behavior will emerge purely from the confluence of massive data and deep learning. New deep learning approaches based on Transformer models have now eclipsed these earlier symbolic AI approaches and attained state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing. However, Transformer models are opaque and do not yet produce human-interpretable semantic representations for sentences and documents.

How does symbolic AI differ from other AI approaches?

Neural networks are good at dealing with complex and unstructured data, such as images and speech. They can learn to perform tasks such as image recognition and natural language processing with high accuracy. 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. It is also usually the case that the data needed to train a machine learning model either doesn’t exist or is insufficient.

What is symbolic AI and LLM?

Conceptually, SymbolicAI is a framework that leverages machine learning – specifically LLMs – as its foundation, and composes operations based on task-specific prompting. We adopt a divide-and-conquer approach to break down a complex problem into smaller, more manageable problems.

As many people have said, things that are easy for humans are hard for computers — like recognizing an oddly shaped chair as a chair, or distinguishing a large upholstered chair from a small couch. Things we do almost without thinking are very hard to encode into rules a computer can follow. The difficulty lies in the shallow math/science background of many communications students. They might have studied logic problems/puzzles, but their memory of how those problems work might be very dim. Most of my students have not learned anything about computer programming, so they don’t come to me with an understanding of how instructions are written in a program.

Towards Symbolic AI

No technique or combination of techniques resolves every problem equally well; therefore, it is necessary to understand their capabilities and limitations. Hybrid AI is not a magic bullet, and both symbolic and non-symbolic AI will continue to be powerful technologies in their own right. The fact that expert understanding and context from everyday life are seldom machine-readable is another impediment. Coding human expertise into AI training datasets presents another issue.

symbolic ai example

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]. Symbolic approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI) represent things within a domain of knowledge through physical symbols, combine symbols into symbol expressions, and manipulate symbols and symbol expressions through inference processes. 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.

Two classical historical examples of this conception of intelligence

The input and output layers of a deep neural network are called visible layers. Earlier experts focused on the symbolic type AI for many decades however, the Connectionist AI is more popular now. This AI is based on how a human mind functions and its neural interconnections. This technique of AI software development is also sometimes called a perceptron to signify a single neuron. Taking an example of machine vision, which might look at a product from all the possible angles. It would be tedious and time-consuming to create rules for all the possible combinations.

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For now, neuro-symbolic AI combines the best of both worlds in innovative ways by enabling systems to have both visual perception and logical reasoning. And, who knows, maybe this avenue of research might one day bring us closer to a form of intelligence that seems more like our own. Neural networks are trained to identify objects in a scene and interpret the natural language of various questions and answers (i.e. “What is the color of the sphere?”).

Deep learning and neuro-symbolic AI 2011–now

Symbolic AI algorithms are designed to solve problems by reasoning about symbols and relationships between symbols. 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.

symbolic ai example

NSCL uses both rule-based programs and neural networks to solve visual question-answering problems. As opposed to pure neural network–based models, the hybrid AI can learn new tasks with less data and is explainable. And unlike symbolic-only models, NSCL doesn’t struggle to analyze the content of images.

Instead of manually laboring through the rules of detecting cat pixels, you can train a deep learning algorithm on many pictures of cats. When you provide it with a new image, it will return the probability that it contains a cat. Henry Kautz,[17] Francesca Rossi,[80] and Bart Selman[81] have also argued for a synthesis. 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.

symbolic ai example

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  • Specifically, we gain insight into whether and at what point they fail, enabling us to follow their StackTraces and pinpoint the failure points.
  • Perhaps one of the most significant advantages of using neuro-symbolic programming is that it allows for a clear understanding of how well our LLMs comprehend simple operations.
  • Other methods rely, for example, on recurrent neural networks that can combine distributed representations into novel ways [17,62].
  • Operations are executed using the Symbol object’s value attribute, which contains the original data type converted into a string representation and sent to the engine for processing.

Are LLMs intelligent?

An LLM does NOT possess “intelligence” — because they don't really understand. However, I agree that it does a near-perfect simulation of intelligence. At least in terms of how we have defined our go-to intelligence test — the Turing Test.