Cognitive Computation: Integrating Neural and Symbolic Approaches

While early work on knowledge representation and inference was primarily symbolic, the corresponding approaches subsequently fell out of favor, and were largely supplanted by connectionist methods. In this workshop, we will work to close the gap between the two paradigms, and aim to formulate a new unified approach that is inspired by our current understanding of human cognitive processing. This is important to help improve our understanding of Neural Information Processing and build better Machine Learning systems, including the integration of learning and reasoning in dynamic knowledge-bases, and reuse of knowledge learned in one application domain in analogous domains.

The workshop brings together established leaders and promising young scientists in the fields of neural computation, logic and artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, natural language understanding, machine learning, cognitive science and computational neuroscience. Invited lectures by senior researchers will be complemented with presentations based on contributed papers reporting recent work (following an open call for papers) and a poster session, giving ample opportunity for participants to interact and discuss the complementary perspectives and emerging approaches.

The workshop targets a single broad theme of general interest to the vast majority of the NIPS community, namely translations between connectionist models and symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning for the purpose of achieving an effective integration of neural learning and cognitive reasoning, called neural-symbolic computing. The study of neural-symbolic computing is now an established topic of wider interest to NIPS with topics that are relevant to almost everyone studying neural information processing. In the 2016 edition of the workshop, special emphasis will be put on language-related aspects and applications of neural-symbolic integration and relevant cognitive computation paradigms.

Keywords: neural-symbolic computing; language processing and reasoning; cognitive agents; multimodal learning; deep networks; knowledge extraction; symbol manipulation; variable binding; memory-based networks; dynamic knowledge-bases.