Recently, strong results have been demonstrated by Deep Recurrent Neural Networks on natural language transduction problems. In this paper we explore the representational power of these models using synthetic grammars designed to exhibit phenomena similar to those found in real transduction problems such as machine translation. These experiments lead us to propose new memory-based recurrent networks that implement continuously differentiable analogues of traditional data structures such as Stacks, Queues, and DeQues. We show that these architectures exhibit superior generalisation performance to Deep RNNs and are often able to learn the underlying generating algorithms in our transduction experiments.

The synthesis of string transformation programs from input-output examples utilizes various techniques, all based on an inductive bias that comprises a restricted set of basic operators to be combined. A new algorithm, Transduce, is proposed, which is founded on the construction of abstract transduction grammars and their generalization. We experimentally demonstrate that Transduce can learn positional transformations efficiently from one or two positive examples without inductive bias, achieving a success rate higher than the current state of the art.

Recently, strong results have been demonstrated by Deep Recurrent Neural Networks on natural language transduction problems. In this paper we explore the representational power of these models using synthetic grammars designed to exhibit phenomena similar to those found in real transduction problems such as machine translation. These experiments lead us to propose new memory-based recurrent networks that implement continuously differentiable analogues of traditional data structures such as Stacks, Queues, and DeQues. We show that these architectures exhibit superior generalisation performance to Deep RNNs and are often able to learn the underlying generating algorithms in our transduction experiments. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.