INSS : A HYBRID NEURO-SYMBOLIC SYSTEM FOR CONSTRUCTIVE MACHINE LEARNING

Ph.D. Thesis (In French) - By Fernando OSORIO(France)
Fernando OSORIO(Brazil)

Abstract

Various Artificial Intelligence methods have been developed to reproduce intelligent human behaviour. These methods allow to reproduce some human reasoning process using the available knowledge. Each method has its advantages, but also some drawbacks. Hybrid systems combine different approaches in order to take advantage of their respective strengths. These hybrid intelligent systems also present the ability to acquire new knowledge from different sources and so to improve their application performance.

This thesis presents our research in the field of hybrid neuro-symbolic systems, and in particular the study of machine learning tools used for constructive knowledge acquisition. We are interested in the automatic acquisition of theoretical knowledge (rules) and empirical knowledge (examples). We present a new hybrid system we implemented: INSS - Incremental Neuro-Symbolic System. This system allows knowledge transfer from the symbolic module to the connectionist module (Artificial Neural Network - ANN), through symbolic rule compilation into an ANN. We can refine the initial ANN knowledge through neural learning using a set of examples. The incremental ANN learning method used, the Cascade-Correlation algorithm, allows us to change or to add new knowledge to the network. Then, the system can also extract modified (or new) symbolic rules from the ANN and validate them. INSS is a hybrid machine learning system that implements a constructive knowledge acquisition method. We conclude by showing the results we obtained with this system in different application domains: ANN artificial problems(The Monk's Problems), computer aided medical diagnosis (Toxic Comas), a cognitive modelling task (The Balance Scale Problem) and autonomous robot control. The results we obtained show the improved performance of INSS and its advantages over others hybrid neuro-symbolic systems.

Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Artificial Neural Networks, Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Systems, Constructive Knowledge Acquisition, Incremental ANN, Rule Compilation and Extraction, Cascase-Correlation, INSS.

Fernando S. Osorio (France) (osorioimag.fr)
RESEAUX Group
Laboratoire LEIBNIZ - INPG / IMAG
46, avenue Felix-Viallet
38031 Grenoble CEDEX - France

Dr. Fernando Santos Osorio - Full Professor
Unisinos University - Centro de Ciências Exatas e Tecnológicas (C6/6)
Mestrado em Computação Aplicada - Computer Science
Av. Unisinos, 950 - Sao Leopoldo, RS - BRAZIL
P.O. Box: 275 - ZIP Code: 93022-000
Phone: + (55) (51) 590-3333 Ext. 1619 (Unisinos)
Fax : + (55) (51) 590-8162
E-mail: osorioexatas.unisinos.br Web: http://www.inf.unisinos.br/~osorio/