Along with this framework, the book proposes a set of interrelated new ideas regarding the modeling of commonsense reasoning which are highly relevant to current research in AI and cognitive science and the ongoing methodological debate.

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.

To endow computers with common sense is one of the major long-term goals of artificial intelligence research. One approach to this problem is to formalize commonsense reasoning using mathematical logic. Commonsense Reasoning: An Event Calculus Based Approach is a detailed, high-level reference on logic-based commonsense reasoning. It uses the event calculus, a highly powerful and usable tool for commonsense reasoning, which Erik Mueller demonstrates as the most effective tool for the broadest range of applications. He provides an up-to-date work promoting the use of the event calculus for commonsense reasoning, and bringing into one place information scattered across many books and papers. Mueller shares the knowledge gained in using the event calculus and extends the literature with detailed event calculus solutions that span many areas of the commonsense world. The Second Edition features new chapters on commonsense reasoning using unstructured information including the Watson system, commonsense reasoning using answer set programming, and techniques for acquisition of commonsense knowledge including crowdsourcing. Understand techniques for automated commonsense reasoning Incorporate commonsense reasoning into software solutions Acquire a broad understanding of the field of commonsense reasoning Gain comprehensive knowledge of the human capacity for commonsense reasoning

One high-level ability of the human brain is to understand what it has learned. This seems to be the crucial advantage in comparison to the brain activity of other primates. At present we are technologically almost ready to artificially reproduce human brain tissue, but we still do not fully understand the information processing and the related biological mechanisms underlying this ability. Thus an electronic clone of the human brain is still far from being realizable. At the same time, around twenty years after the revival of the connectionist paradigm, we are not yet satisfied with the typical subsymbolic attitude of devices like neural networks: we can make them learn to solve even difficult problems, but without a clear explanation of why a solution works. Indeed, to widely use these devices in a reliable and non elementary way we need formal and understandable expressions of the learnt functions. of being tested, manipulated and composed with These must be susceptible other similar expressions to build more structured functions as a solution of complex problems via the usual deductive methods of the Artificial Intelligence. Many effort have been steered in this directions in the last years, constructing artificial hybrid systems where a cooperation between the sub symbolic processing of the neural networks merges in various modes with symbolic algorithms. In parallel, neurobiology research keeps on supplying more and more detailed explanations of the low-level phenomena responsible for mental processes.

Computational Architectures Integrating Neural and Symbolic Processes: A Perspective on the State of the Art focuses on a currently emerging body of research. With the reemergence of neural networks in the 1980s with their emphasis on overcoming some of the limitations of symbolic AI, there is clearly a need to support some form of high-level symbolic processing in connectionist networks. As argued by many researchers, on both the symbolic AI and connectionist sides, many cognitive tasks, e.g. language understanding and common sense reasoning, seem to require high-level symbolic capabilities. How these capabilities are realized in connectionist networks is a difficult question and it constitutes the focus of this book. Computational Architectures Integrating Neural and Symbolic Processes addresses the underlying architectural aspects of the integration of neural and symbolic processes. In order to provide a basis for a deeper understanding of existing divergent approaches and provide insight for further developments in this field, this book presents: (1) an examination of specific architectures (grouped together according to their approaches), their strengths and weaknesses, why they work, and what they predict, and (2) a critique/comparison of these approaches. Computational Architectures Integrating Neural and Symbolic Processes is of interest to researchers, graduate students, and interested laymen, in areas such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, and neurocomputing, in keeping up-to-date with the newest research trends. It is a comprehensive, in-depth introduction to this new emerging field.

With low computational complexity and relatively short development time, Fuzzy Logic is an indispensable tool for engineering applications. The field is growing at an unprecedented rate, and there is a need for a book that describes essential tools, applications, examples, and perspectives in the field of fuzzy learning. The editors of Fuzzy Learni

Intelligent systems enhance the capacities made available by the internet and other computer-based technologies. This book deals with the theory behind the solutions to difficult problems in the construction of intelligent systems. Particular attention is paid to situations in which the available information and data may be imprecise, uncertain, incomplete or of linguistic nature. Various methodologies for these cases are discussed, among which are probabilistic, possibilistic, fuzzy, logical, evidential and network-based frameworks. One purpose of the book is to consider how these methods can be used cooperatively. Topics included in the book include fundamental issues in uncertainty, the rapidly emerging discipline of information aggregation, neural networks, bayesian networks and other network methods, as well as logic-based systems.