Connectionist Symbolic Integration From Unified To Hybrid Approaches

Connectionist-Symbolic Integration

A variety of ideas, approaches, and techniques exist -- in terms of both architecture and learning -- and this abundance seems to lead to many exciting possibilities in terms of theoretical advances and application potentials. Despite the apparent diversity, there is clearly an underlying unifying theme: architectures that bring together symbolic and connectionist models to achieve a synthesis and synergy of the two different paradigms, and the learning and knowledge acquisition methods for developing such architectures. More effort needs to be extended to exploit the possibilities and opportunities in this area. This book is the outgrowth of The IJCAI Workshop on Connectionist-Symbolic Integration: From Unified to Hybrid Approaches, held in conjunction with the fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '95). Featuring various presentations and discussions, this two-day workshop brought to light many new ideas, controversies, and syntheses which lead to the present volume. This book is concerned with the development, analysis, and application of hybrid connectionist-symbolic models in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Drawing contributions from a large international group of experts, it describes and compares a variety of models in this area. The types of models discussed cover a wide range of the evolving spectrum of hybrid models, thus serving as a well-balanced progress report on the state of the art. As such, this volume provides an information clearinghouse for various proposed approaches and models that share the common belief that connectionist and symbolic models can be usefully combined and integrated, and such integration may lead to significant advances in understanding intelligence.

Connectionist-symbolic Integration : from Unified to Hybrid Approaches

Hybrid Neural Systems

Hybrid neural systems are computational systems which are based mainly on artificial neural networks and allow for symbolic interpretation or interaction with symbolic components. This book is derived from a workshop held during the NIPS'98 in Denver, Colorado, USA, and competently reflects the state of the art of research and development in hybrid neural systems. The 26 revised full papers presented together with an introductory overview by the volume editors have been through a twofold process of careful reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: structured connectionism and rule representation; distributed neural architectures and language processing; transformation and explanation; robotics, vision, and cognitive approaches.