Connectionist Semantic Systematicity in Language Production

A novel connectionist model of sentence production is presented, which employs rich situation model representations originally proposed for modeling systematicity in comprehension (Frank, Haselager, & van Rooij, 2009). The high overall performance of our model demonstrates that such representations are not only suitable for comprehension, but also for modeling language production. Further, the model is able to produce novel encodings (active vs. passive) for a particular semantics, as well as generate such encodings for previously unseen situations, thus demonstrating both syntactic and semantic systematicity. Our results provide yet further evidence that such connectionist approaches can achieve systematicity, in production as well as comprehension.