Memory Augmented Recursive Neural Networks

Abstract

Recursive neural networks have shown an impressive performance for modeling compositional data compared to their recurrent counterparts. Although recursive neural networks are better at capturing long range dependencies, their generalization performance starts to decay as the test data becomes more compositional and potentially deeper than the training data. In this paper, we present memory-augmented recursive neural networks to address this generalization performance loss on deeper data points. We augment Tree-LSTMs with an external memory, namely neural stacks. We define soft push and pop operations for filling and emptying the memory to ensure that the networks remain end-to-end differentiable. In order to assess the effectiveness of the external memory, we evaluate our model on a neural programming task introduced in the literature called equation verification. Our results indicate that augmenting recursive neural networks with external memory consistently improves the generalization performance on deeper data points compared to the state-of-the-art Tree-LSTM by up to 10%.

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