Using Frequency-domain Holographic Reduced Representations (FHRRs), we extend a Vector-Symbolic Architecture (VSA) encoding of Lisp 1.5 with primitives for arithmetic operations using Residue Hyperdimensional Computing (RHC). Encoding a Turing-complete syntax over a high-dimensional vector space increases the expressivity of neural network states, enabling network states to contain arbitrarily structured representations that are inherently interpretable. We discuss the potential applications of the VSA encoding in machine learning tasks, as well as the importance of encoding structured representations and designing neural networks whose behavior is sensitive to the structure of their representations in virtue of attaining more general intelligent agents than exist at present.

We examine the benefits of visual context in training neural language models to perform next-word prediction.A multi-modal neural architecture is introduced that outperform its equivalent trained on language alone with a 2% decrease in perplexity, even when no visual context is available at test.Fine-tuning the embeddings of a pre-trained state-of-theart bidirectional language model (BERT) in the language modeling framework yields a 3.5% improvement.The advantage for training with visual context when testing without is robust across different languages (English, German and Spanish) and different models (GRU, LSTM, ∆-RNN, as well as those that use BERT embeddings).Thus, language models perform better when they learn like a baby, i.e, in a multi-modal environment.This finding is compatible with the theory of situated cognition: language is inseparable from its physical context.