On learning an interpreted language with recurrent models

Abstract Can recurrent neural nets, inspired by human sequential data processing, learn to understand language? We construct simplified data sets 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 generalize 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.