Introducing Neuro-Symbolic AI – the Next Level of AI

Throughout the previous chapters, we discussed how the primary motivation behind artificial intelligence (AI) is to model human intelligence into computer systems. Over the years, we have witnessed the innovation of many algorithms and techniques that improved computer cognitive and logical processing machines. In Chapter 2, we introduced symbolic AI as one of the first research efforts targeted toward achieving this highly desirable accolade. We discussed how symbolic AI has enabled us to embed world-knowledge constructs (logical rules) into our computer systems. However, the symbolic AI process has proven to be rather cumbersome and expensive. Researchers have also discovered that symbolic AI programs tend to lose accuracy as more rules are represented in the program. To circumvent the tedious process of symbolic rule representation, the field shifted its focus to more data-driven techniques.

Neural networks (NNs) and...