Special issue on integration of symbolic and connectionist systems

[Paolo Frasconi]

	  Integration of symbolic and connectionist systems
		     Special issue of the journal
		      Cognitive Systems Research

			   CALL FOR PAPERS

BACKGROUND 
A successful integration of connectionist and other statistical
learning systems with symbol based techniques could bridge reasoning
and knowledge representation with empirical learning, significantly
advancing our ability of modeling cognitive processes under a unified
perspective. This area has attracted many researchers, both in
computer and cognitive sciences, but is still replete of serious
difficulties and challenges. While existing models can address
particular aspects in this integration (often by making use of
different assumptions and techniques) only few unified approaches have
been proposed and they are still very limited, showing both the lack
of a full understanding of the relevant aspects of this discipline and
the broad complexity in scope and tasks.

One of the main difficulties is that symbolic techniques can easily
deal with rich and expressive representation languages, whereas
connectionist/statistical learners are mostly effective in the case of
simple propositional languages. As a result, it is customary to
exploit the learning capabilities of these models by operating on
"flat" (vector-based, or attribute-value) representations, but this
often requires additional machinery for interfacing the learner with
the actual domain of interest. For example, if data are available in
structured or semi-structured way, a conversion into a lower level
(propositional) representation is often performed. Similarly, since
internal representations associated with the learner are not easily
interpretable, a conversion into a higher level representation
language is also necessary.

Different aspects of integration have been investigated and probed
independently from each other and thus a higher level of
cross-interaction among these issues is necessary, making use of all
the computational tools we have available, such as deterministic and
probabilistic approaches, event-based modeling, computational logic,
computational learning theory, and so on.

TOPICS
In this special issue we aim at collecting high quality papers that
show novel methods, ideas, and positions, advancing to the state of
the art in this area.
We encourage submissions of papers addressing, in addition to other
relevant issues, the following topics:

- Algorithms for extraction, injection and refinement of symbolic
  knowledge from, into and by neural networks.
- Inductive discovery/formation of structured knowledge.
- Classification, recognition, prediction, matching and manipulation
  of structured information.
- Relational learning using connectionist and belief network
  techniques.
- Comparisons between connectionist/statistical, and symbolic
  learning systems that can exploit super-propositional representation
  languages.
- Applications of hybrid symbolic-connectionist models to real-world
  problems.
- Taxonomies that may be useful for selecting the best suited
  integration paradigms and techniques to be used in particular
  applications.
- Investigations of fundamental aspects of and approaches to the
  integration of symbolic and connectionist methods.


SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES
Papers should be submitted electronically (PostScript and PDF are the
only acceptable formats) by using the anonymous ftp site
ftp.dsi.unifi.it. Use the /csr directory to deposit
submissions. Please choose a unique clearly identifying filename. For
convenience, common compression utilities (gzip, winzip, compress)
can be used. We also require a follow up email message to
paolo at dsi.unifi.it to let us know that the file has been posted. In
the email message please include title, keywords, abstract, and full
address of the contacting author. For details about the journal of
Cognitive Systems Research, and to download the journal template files
(LaTeX, Word, etc.) please visit http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/cogsys.
For updates about the special issue, please visit
http://www.dsi.unifi.it/~paolo/csr.


IMPORTANT DATES
Submission Deadline:	 December 15, 2000
Notification to authors: March 15, 2000


GUEST EDITORS
Paolo Frasconi, University of Florence, Italy (paolo at dsi.unifi.it)
Marco Gori, University of Siena, Italy, (marco at ing.unisi.it)
Franz Kurfess, California Polytechnic State University (fkurfess at csc.calpoly.edu)
Alessandro Sperduti, University of Pisa, Italy (perso at di.unipi.it)