Ontology Summit 2024

Neuro-Symbolic Techniques for and with Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs

The summit will survey current techniques that combine neural network machine learning with symbolic methods, especially methods based on ontologies and knowledge graphs.

Ontologies are representations of a knowledge domain. They define the concepts, relationships, properties, axioms and rules within that domain, providing a framework that enables a deep understanding of that subject area. Knowledge graphs are structured representations of semantic knowledge that are stored in a graph. Ontologies and knowledge graphs are used to enable machine reasoning and semantic understanding, allowing a system to draw inferences and to derive new information and relationships between entities.

Neural network and other machine learning models, such as LLMs, are trained on large corpora, learning the patterns and connections between words and images. Hence, although their “knowledge base” is broad, it is also sometimes incorrect and/or biased, and don't explicitly understand the semantics or relationships in that content.

Consequently, neural network and traditional AI techniques are complementary. The Fall Series of the summit explored the similarities and distinctions between ontologies and LLMs, as well as how they can be used together. The Main Summit Series will examine the more general topic of neuro-symbolic techniques, especially how one can leverage the complementary benefits of neural networks and of ontologies and knowledge graphs.

Main Series Tracks

• Track A. Foundations and Architectures
• Track B. Large Language Models, Ontologies and Knowedge Graphs
• Track C. Applications
• Track D. Risks and Ethics