Living a discrete life in a continuous world: Reference with distributed representations

Abstract

Reference is a crucial property of language that allows us to connect linguistic expressions to the world. Modeling it requires handling both continuous and discrete aspects of meaning. Data-driven models excel at the former, but struggle with the latter, and the reverse is true for symbolic models. This paper (a) introduces a concrete referential task to test both aspects, called cross-modal entity tracking; (b) proposes a neural network architecture that uses external memory to build an entity library inspired in the DRSs of DRT, with a mechanism to dynamically introduce new referents or add information to referents that are already in the library. Our model shows promise: it beats traditional neural network architectures on the task. However, it is still outperformed by Memory Networks, another model with external memory.