Exploring Aspects Regarding Reasoning in Neuro-Symbolic Rules and Connectionist Expert Systems

Neuro-symbolic approaches combine neural and symbolic methods. This paper explores aspects regarding the reasoning mechanisms of two neuro-symbolic approaches, that is, neurules and connectionist expert systems. Both of them provide reasoning and explanation facilities. Neurules are a type of neuro-symbolic rules tightly integrating the neural and symbolic components and giving pre-eminence to the symbolic component. Connectionist expert systems give pre-eminence to the connectionist component. The aspects explored in this paper have not been previously addressed. As far as neurules are concerned, an aspect playing a role in conflict resolution (i.e., order of neurules) is explored. Experimental results show an improvement in reasoning efficiency. As far as connectionist expert systems are concerned, variations of the reasoning mechanism are explored. Experimental results show that none of the alternative versions of the reasoning mechanism outperforms the others in all cases.