Deep learning models contributed to reaching unprecedented results in prediction and classification tasks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. However, alongside this notable progress, they do not provide human-understandable insights on how a specific result was achieved. In contexts where the impact of AI on human life is relevant (e.g., recruitment tools, medical diagnoses, etc.), explainability is not only a desirable property, but it is -or, in some cases, it will be soon-a legal requirement. Most of the available approaches to implement eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) focus on technical solutions usable only by experts able to manipulate the recursive mathematical functions in deep learning algorithms. A complementary approach is represented by symbolic AI, where symbols are elements of a lingua franca between humans and deep learning. In this context, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and their underlying semantic technologies are the modern implementation of symbolic AI—while being less flexible and robust to noise compared to deep learning models, KGs are natively developed to be explainable. In this paper, we review the main XAI approaches existing in the literature, underlying their strengths and limitations, and we propose neural-symbolic integration as a cornerstone to design an AI which is closer to non-insiders comprehension. Within such a general direction, we identify three specific challenges for future research—knowledge matching, cross-disciplinary explanations and interactive explanations.
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as a core technology for incorporating human knowledge because of their capability to capture the relational dimension of information and of its semantic properties. The nature of KGs meets one of the vocational pursuits of academic institutions, which is sharing their intellectual output, especially publications. In this paper, we describe and make available the Polito Knowledge Graph (PKG) –which semantically connects information on more than 23,000 publications and 34,000 authors– and Geranium, a semantic platform that leverages the properties of the PKG to offer advanced services for search and exploration. In particular, we describe the Geranium recommendation system, which exploits Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to suggest collaboration opportunities between researchers of different disciplines. This work integrates the state of the art because we use data from a real application in the scholarly domain, while the current literature still explores the combination of KGs and GNNs in a prototypal context using synthetic data. The results shows that the fusion of these technologies represents a promising approach for recommendation and metadata inference in the scholarly domain.
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