Neural Event Semantics for Grounded Language Understanding

Abstract

We present a new conjunctivist framework, neural event semantics (NES), for compositional grounded language understanding. Our approach treats all words as classifiers that compose to form a sentence meaning by multiplying output scores. These classifiers apply to spatial regions (events) and NES derives its semantic structure from language by routing events to different classifier argument inputs via soft attention. NES is trainable end-to-end by gradient descent with minimal supervision. We evaluate our method on compositional grounded language tasks in controlled synthetic and real-world settings. NES offers stronger generalization capability than standard function-based compositional frameworks, while improving accuracy over state-of-the-art neural methods on real-world language tasks.