Decoding the Thought Vector

Neural networks have the rather uncanny knack for turning meaning into numbers. Data flows from the input to the output, getting pushed through a series of transformations which process the data into increasingly abstruse vectors of representations. These numbers, the activations of the network, carry useful information from one layer of the network to the next, and are believed to represent the data at different layers of abstraction. But the vectors themselves have thus far defied interpretation. In this blog post I put forward a possible interpretation of these vectors. I argue we shouldn't take these vectors literally, but rather as an encoding for a simpler, sparse data structure.