This tutorial will provide an overview of recent advances
on neuro-symbolic approaches for information retrieval. A decade ago,
knowledge graphs and semantic annotations technology led to active research on how to best leverage symbolic knowledge. At the same time,
neural methods have demonstrated to be versatile and highly effective.
From a neural network perspective, the same representation approach
can service document ranking or knowledge graph reasoning. End-to-end
training allows to optimize complex methods for downstream tasks.
We are at the point where both the symbolic and the neural research
advances are coalescing into neuro-symbolic approaches. The underlying
research questions are how to best combine symbolic and neural approaches, what kind of symbolic/neural approaches are most suitable for
which use case, and how to best integrate both ideas to advance the state
of the art in information retrieval.