Learn more by training less: systematicity in sentence processing by recurrent networks

Connectionist models of sentence processing must learn to behave systematically by generalizing from a small training set. To what extent recurrent neural networks manage this generalization task is investigated. In contrast to Van der Velde et al. (Connection Sci., 16, pp. 21–46, 2004), it is found that simple recurrent networks do show so-called weak combinatorial systematicity, although their performance remains limited. It is argued that these limitations arise from overfitting in large networks. Generalization can be improved by increasing the size of the recurrent layer without training its connections, thereby combining a large short-term memory with a small long-term memory capacity. Performance can be improved further by increasing the number of word types in the training set.