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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 re- search 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 ap- proaches, 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. 

Methods and applications are inextricably linked in science, and in particular in the domain of text-as-data. In this paper, we examine one such text-as-data application, an established economic index that measures economic policy uncertainty from keyword occurrences in news. This index, which is shown to correlate with firm investment, employment, and excess market returns, has had substantive impact in both the private sector and academia. Yet, as we revisit and extend the original authors’ annotations and text measurements we find interesting text-as-data methodological research questions: (1) Are annotator disagreements a reflection of ambiguity in language? (2) Do alternative text measurements correlate with one another and with measures of external predictive validity? We find for this application (1) some annotator disagreements of economic policy uncertainty can be attributed to ambiguity in language, and (2) switching measurements from keyword-matching to supervised machine learning classifiers results in low correlation, a concerning implication for the validity of the index.