Decoding distributed tree structures

Encoding structural information in low-dimensional vectors is a recent trend in natural language processing that builds on distributed representations [14]. However, although the success in replacing structural information in final tasks, it is still unclear whether these distributed representations contain enough information on original structures. In this paper we want to take a specific example of a distributed representation, the distributed trees (DT) [17], and analyze the reverse problem: can the original structure be reconstructed given only its distributed representation? Our experiments show that this is indeed the case, DT can encode a great deal of information of the original tree, and this information is often enough to reconstruct the original object format.