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Abstract Explainability and Safety engender trust. These require a model to exhibit consistency and reliability. To achieve these, it is necessary to use and analyzedataandknowledgewith statistical and symbolic AI methods relevant to the AI application––neither alone will do. Consequently, we argue and seek to demonstrate that the NeuroSymbolic AI approach is better suited for making AI a trusted AI system. We present the CREST framework that shows howConsistency,Reliability, user‐levelExplainability, andSafety are built on NeuroSymbolic methods that use data and knowledge to support requirements for critical applications such as health and well‐being. This article focuses on Large Language Models (LLMs) as the chosen AI system within the CREST framework. LLMs have garnered substantial attention from researchers due to their versatility in handling a broad array of natural language processing (NLP) scenarios. As examples, ChatGPT and Google's MedPaLM have emerged as highly promising platforms for providing information in general and health‐related queries, respectively. Nevertheless, these models remain black boxes despite incorporating human feedback and instruction‐guided tuning. For instance, ChatGPT can generateunsafe responsesdespite instituting safety guardrails. CREST presents a plausible approach harnessing procedural and graph‐based knowledge within a NeuroSymbolic framework to shed light on the challenges associated with LLMs. 

Language models have the potential to assess mental health using social media data. By analyzing online posts and conversations, these models can detect patterns indicating mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts. They examine keywords, language markers, and sentiment to gain insights into an individual’s mental well-being. This information is crucial for early detection, intervention, and support, improving mental health care and prevention strategies. However, using language models for mental health assessments from social media has two limitations: (1) They do not compare posts against clinicians’ diagnostic processes, and (2) It’s challenging to explain language model outputs using concepts that the clinician can understand, i.e., clinician-friendly explanations. In this study, we introduce Process Knowledge-infused Learning (PK-iL), a new learning paradigm that layers clinical process knowledge structures on language model outputs, enabling clinician-friendly explanations of the underlying language model predictions. We rigorously test our methods on existing benchmark datasets, augmented with such clinical process knowledge, and release a new dataset for assessing suicidality. PKiL performs competitively, achieving a 70% agreement with users, while other XAI methods only achieve 47% agreement (average inter-rater agreement of 0.72). Our evaluations demonstrate that PK-iL effectively explains model predictions to clinicians. 

Neurosymbolic artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging and quickly advancing field that combines the subsymbolic strengths of (deep) neural networks and the explicit, symbolic knowledge contained in knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance explainability and safety in AI systems. This approach addresses a key criticism of current generation systems, namely, their inability to generate human-understandable explanations for their outcomes and ensure safe behaviors, especially in scenarios with unknown unknowns (e.g., cybersecurity, privacy). The integration of neural networks, which excel at exploring complex data spaces, and symbolic KGs representing domain knowledge, allows AI systems to reason, learn, and generalize in a manner understandable to experts. This article describes how applications in cybersecurity and privacy, two of the most demanding domains in terms of the need for AI to be explainable while being highly accurate in complex environments, can benefit from neurosymbolic AI. 

Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) are utilized in health care to provide patient services such as counseling and suggestive care. They are not used for patient diagnostic assistance because they cannot adhere to safety constraints and specialized clinical process knowledge ( ProKnow ) used to obtain clinical diagnoses. In this work, we define ProKnow as an ordered set of information that maps to evidence-based guidelines or categories of conceptual understanding to experts in a domain. We also introduce a new dataset of diagnostic conversations guided by safety constraints and ProKnow that healthcare professionals use ( ProKnow - data ). We develop a method for natural language question generation (NLG) that collects diagnostic information from the patient interactively ( ProKnow - algo ). We demonstrate the limitations of using state-of-the-art large-scale language models (LMs) on this dataset. ProKnow - algo incorporates the process knowledge through explicitly modeling safety, knowledge capture, and explainability. As computational metrics for evaluation do not directly translate to clinical settings, we involve expert clinicians in designing evaluation metrics that test four properties: safety, logical coherence, and knowledge capture for explainability while minimizing the standard cross entropy loss to preserve distribution semantics-based similarity to the ground truth. LMs with ProKnow - algo generated 89% safer questions in the depression and anxiety domain (tested property: safety ). Further, without ProKnow - algo generations question did not adhere to clinical process knowledge in ProKnow - data (tested property: knowledge capture ). In comparison, ProKnow - algo -based generations yield a 96% reduction in our metrics to measure knowledge capture. The explainability of the generated question is assessed by computing similarity with concepts in depression and anxiety knowledge bases. Overall, irrespective of the type of LMs, ProKnow - algo achieved an averaged 82% improvement over simple pre-trained LMs on safety, explainability, and process-guided question generation. For reproducibility, we will make ProKnow - data and the code repository of ProKnow - algo publicly available upon acceptance. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for mental healthcare (MHCare) have been ever-growing after realizing the importance of early interventions for patients with chronic mental health (MH) conditions. Social media (SocMedia) emerged as the go-to platform for supporting patients seeking MHCare. The creation of peer-support groups without social stigma has resulted in patients transitioning from clinical settings to SocMedia supported interactions for quick help. Researchers started exploring SocMedia content in search of cues that showcase correlation or causation between different MH conditions to design better interventional strategies. User-level Classification-based AI systems were designed to leverage diverse SocMedia data from various MH conditions, to predict MH conditions. Subsequently, researchers created classification schemes to measure the severity of each MH condition. Such ad-hoc schemes, engineered features, and models not only require a large amount of data but fail to allow clinically acceptable and explainable reasoning over the outcomes. To improve Neural-AI for MHCare, infusion of clinical symbolic knowledge that clinicans use in decision making is required. An impactful use case of Neural-AI systems in MH is conversational systems. These systems require coordination between classification and generation to facilitate humanistic conversation in conversational agents (CA). Current CAs with deep language models lack factual correctness, medical relevance, and safety in their generations, which intertwine with unexplainable statistical classification techniques. This lecture-style tutorial will demonstrate our investigations into Neuro-symbolic methods of infusing clinical knowledge to improve the outcomes of Neural-AI systems to improve interventions for MHCare:(a) We will discuss the use of diverse clinical knowledge in creating specialized datasets to train Neural-AI systems effectively. (b) Patients with cardiovascular disease express MH symptoms differently based on gender differences. We will show that knowledge-infused Neural-AI systems can identify gender-specific MH symptoms in such patients. (c) We will describe strategies for infusing clinical process knowledge as heuristics and constraints to improve language models in generating relevant questions and responses. 

Epidemics like Covid-19 and Ebola have impacted people’s lives signifcantly. The impact of mobility of people across the countries or states in the spread of epidemics has been signifcant. The spread of disease due to factors local to the population under consideration is termed the endogenous spread. The spread due to external factors like migration, mobility, etc., is called the exogenous spread. In this paper, we introduce the Exo-SIR model, an extension of the popular SIR model and a few variants of the model. The novelty in our model is that it captures both the exogenous and endogenous spread of the virus. First, we present an analytical study. Second, we simulate the Exo-SIR model with and without assuming contact network for the population. Third, we implement the Exo-SIR model on real datasets regarding Covid-19 and Ebola. We found that endogenous infection is infuenced by exogenous infection. Furthermore, we found that the Exo-SIR model predicts the peak time better than the SIR model. Hence, the Exo-SIR model would be helpful for governments to plan policy interventions at the time of a pandemic. Keywords Covid-19, Ebola, Epidemic modeling, Compartment model, Exogenous infection, Endogenous infection, SIR, Exo-SIR 

d public health. For such high-impact areas, accurately capturing relevant entities at a more granular level is critical, as this information influences real-world processes. On the other hand, training NER models for a specific domain without handcrafted features requires an extensive amount of labeled data, which is expensive in human effort and time. In this study, we employ distant supervision utilizing a domain-specific ontology to reduce the need for human labor and train models incorporating domain-specific (e.g., drug use) external knowledge to recognize domain specific entities. We capture entities related the drug use and their trends in government epidemiology reports, with an improvement of 8% in F1-score. 

Conversational Agents (CAs) powered with deep language models (DLMs) have shown tremendous promise in the domain of mental health. Prominently, the CAs have been used to provide informational or therapeutic services (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy) to patients. However, the utility of CAs to assist in mental health triaging has not been explored in the existing work as it requires a controlled generation of follow-up questions (FQs), which are often initiated and guided by the mental health professionals (MHPs) in clinical settings. In the context of ‘depression’, our experiments show that DLMs coupled with process knowledge in a mental health questionnaire generate 12.54% and 9.37% better FQs based on similarity and longest common subsequence matches to questions in the PHQ-9 dataset respectively, when compared with DLMs without process knowledge support.Despite coupling with process knowledge, we find that DLMs are still prone to hallucination, i.e., generating redundant, irrelevant, and unsafe FQs. We demonstrate the challenge of using existing datasets to train a DLM for generating FQs that adhere to clinical process knowledge. To address this limitation, we prepared an extended PHQ-9 based dataset, PRIMATE, in collaboration with MHPs. PRIMATE contains annotations regarding whether a particular question in the PHQ-9 dataset has already been answered in the user’s initial description of the mental health condition. We used PRIMATE to train a DLM in a supervised setting to identify which of the PHQ-9 questions can be answered directly from the user’s post and which ones would require more information from the user. Using performance analysis based on MCC scores, we show that PRIMATE is appropriate for identifying questions in PHQ-9 that could guide generative DLMs towards controlled FQ generation (with minimal hallucination) suitable for aiding triaging. The dataset created as a part of this research can be obtained from https://github.com/primate-mh/Primate2022