Learning Hierarchical Structures On-The-Fly With A Recurrent-Recursive Model For Sequences

We propose a hierarchical model for sequential data that learns a tree on-the-fly, i.e. while reading the sequence. In the model, a recurrent network adapts its structure and reuses recurrent weights in a recursive manner. This creates adaptive skip-connections that ease the learning of long-term dependencies. The tree structure can either be inferred without supervision through reinforcement learning, or learned in a supervised manner. We provide preliminary experiments in a novel Math Expression Evaluation (MEE) task, which is explicitly crafted to have a hierarchical tree structure that can be used to study the effectiveness of our model. Additionally, we test our model in a well-known propositional logic and language modelling tasks. Experimental results show the potential of our approach.