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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Connectionist Semantic Systematicity in Language Production

Abstract

A novel connectionist model of sentence production is pre-sented, which employs rich situation model representationsoriginally proposed for modeling systematicity in comprehen-sion (Frank, Haselager, & van Rooij, 2009). The high overallperformance of our model demonstrates that such represen-tations are not only suitable for comprehension, but also formodeling language production. Further, the model is able toproduce novel encodings (active vs. passive) for a particularsemantics, as well as generate such encodings for previouslyunseen situations, thus demonstrating both syntactic and se-mantic systematicity. Our results provide yet further evidencethat such connectionist approaches can achieve systematicity,in production as well as comprehension.