We present a novel neural architecture for answering queries, designed to optimally leverage explicit support in the form of query-answer memories. Our model is able to refine and update a given query while separately accumulating evidence for predicting the answer. Its architecture reflects this separation with dedicated embedding matrices and loosely connected information pathways (modules) for updating the query and accumulating evidence. This separation of responsibilities effectively decouples the search for query related support and the prediction of the answer. On recent benchmark datasets for reading comprehension, our model achieves state-of-the-art results. A qualitative analysis demonstrates that the model effectively accumulates weighted evidence from the query and over multiple support retrieval cycles which results in a robust answer prediction.
@cite_14: Many important NLP problems can be posed as dual-sequence or sequence-tosequence modeling tasks. Recent advances in building end-to-end neural architectures have been highly successful in solving such tasks. In this work we propose a new architecture for dual-sequence modeling that is based on associative memory. We derive AM-RNNs, a recurrent associative memory (AM) which augments generic recurrent neural networks (RNN). This architecture is extended to the Dual AM-RNN which operates on two AMs at once. Our models achieve very competitive results on textual entailment. A qualitative analysis demonstrates that long range dependencies between source and target-sequence can be bridged effectively using Dual AM-RNNs. However, an initial experiment on autoencoding reveals that these benefits are not exploited by the system when learning to solve sequence-to-sequence tasks which indicates that additional supervision or regularization is needed.
@cite_8: We investigate a new method to augment recurrent neural networks with extra memory without increasing the number of network parameters. The system has an associative memory based on complex-valued vectors and is closely related to Holographic Reduced Representations and Long Short-Term Memory networks. Holographic Reduced Representations have limited capacity: as they store more information, each retrieval becomes noisier due to interference. Our system in contrast creates redundant copies of stored information, which enables retrieval with reduced noise. Experiments demonstrate faster learning on multiple memorization tasks.
Recently, other forms of explicit memory have been suggested for neural architectures. For instance, associative memory can be used to effectively compress multiple memories into redundant copies of a single memory array. It has shown very promising results, e.g., for language modeling @cite_8 or recognizing textual entailment @cite_14 , and might therefore be suited to compress large amounts of external memories when used in conjunction with our model.