Introducing Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence to Humanities and Social Sciences: Why Is It Possible and What Can Be Done?

Abstract

With the support of artificial intelligence (AI), the smart applications in all walks of life have brought great changes to human society. Not only being concerned, analysed and criticized by scholars from Humanities and social sciences, AI also plays an important role in empirical research methods, thus facilitating the transformation of research paradigms in these fields. At present, neuro-symbolic AI, as a new product of the integration of two major factions in the field of artificial intelligence - connectionism and symbolism, has high application value in studying and solving the humanistic and social problems involving massive data due to its learning capability of perceiving the environment as well as reasoning capability of manipulating symbols. The introduction of neuro-symbolic AI is also of great significance for the development of emerging interdisciplinary fields such as digital humanities and computational social sciences. This paper aims to clarify the connections between neuro-symbolic AI and Humanities and social sciences, summarize the latest developing trends and representative applications, and explore a feasible path for the expansion of pluralistic methodologies in Humanities and social sciences to adapt to the age of big data.