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.

We study sequential language games in which two players, each with private information, communicate to achieve a common goal. In such games, a successful player must (i) infer the partner’s private information from the partner’s messages, (ii) generate messages that are most likely to help with the goal, and (iii) reason pragmatically about the partner’s strategy. We propose a model that captures all three characteristics and demonstrate their importance in capturing human behavior on a new goal-oriented dataset we collected using crowdsourcing.

We present a model of pragmatic referring expression interpretation in a grounded communication task (identifying colors from descriptions) that draws upon predictions from two recurrent neural network classifiers, a speaker and a listener, unified by a recursive pragmatic reasoning framework. Experiments show that this combined pragmatic model interprets color descriptions more accurately than the classifiers from which it is built, and that much of this improvement results from combining the speaker and listener perspectives. We observe that pragmatic reasoning helps primarily in the hardest cases: when the model must distinguish very similar colors, or when few utterances adequately express the target color. Our findings make use of a newly-collected corpus of human utterances in color reference games, which exhibit a variety of pragmatic behaviors. We also show that the embedded speaker model reproduces many of these pragmatic behaviors.