Papers › On learning an interpreted language with recurrent models

On learning an interpreted language with recurrent models

11 Sep 2018WS 2018 11arXiv:1809.04128archive 2025-07-28

Denis Paperno

Can recurrent neural nets, inspired by human sequential data processing, learn to understand language? We construct simplified datasets reflecting core properties of natural language as modeled in formal syntax and semantics: recursive syntactic structure and compositionality. We find LSTM and GRU networks to generalise to compositional interpretation well, but only in the most favorable learning settings, with a well-paced curriculum, extensive training data, and left-to-right (but not right-to-left) composition.

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LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

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