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Can recursive neural tensor networks learn logical reasoning? [pdf] (arxiv.org)
38 points by mutor on Mar 18, 2015 | hide | past | pdf | 3 comments on HN

In plain words: A network that builds sentence meaning by combining word meanings was trained on sentences with logical inferences, like getting "some animal walks" from "some dog walks." It handled new kinds of reasoning patterns well in nearly every case, showing learned representations can capture basic logic.

Abstract · Can recursive neural tensor networks learn logical reasoning?

Recursive neural network models and their accompanying vector representations for words have seen success in an array of increasingly semantically sophisticated tasks, but almost nothing is known about their ability to accurately capture the aspects of linguistic meaning that are necessary for interpretation or reasoning. To evaluate this, I train a recursive model on a new corpus of constructed examples of logical reasoning in short sentences, like the inference of "some animal walks" from "some dog walks" or "some cat walks," given that dogs and cats are animals. This model learns representations that generalize well to new types of reasoning pattern in all but a few cases, a result which is promising for the ability of learned representation models to capture logical reasoning.

Samuel R. Bowman
arXiv:1312.6192 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Dec 21, 2013 · updated Feb 15, 2014
abstract · pdf · html · Submitted for presentation at ICLR 2014. Source code and data: http://goo.gl/PSyF5u

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So the paper says yes, but offers no analysis on why it's potentially better or different from other models of logical reasoning?
For NLP. Presumably you could extract it from sentences with techniques like Socher's:

http://www.socher.org/index.php/Main/ParsingNaturalScenesAnd...

There was an example in Socher's paper of a tree of logic - ands, ors, nots (not shown on that site, but in the paper) - which logic, he showed his RNN technique can represent. The OP paper I imagine is more along those lines. Being able to capture full logic like that gets you that much closer to being able to extract the full meaning from language, not just words that provide a general flavor.

My usual plea for abstracts over PDFs: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6192 .