Kyle Roth

System 1 cognitive abilities are about low-level perception and intuitive knowledge. System 2 cognitive abilities can be described verbally, and include things like reasoning, planning, and imagination. In cognitive neuroscience, the “Global Workspace Theory” says that at each moment specific pieces of information become a part of working memory and become globally available to other unconscious computational processes. Relative to the unconscious state, the conscious state is low-dimensional, focusing on a few things.

They had a biRNN with attention for alignment encoding, and then a single linear function of each one-hot encoded word for encoding that single word. Their reasoning was that by separating the alignment from the meaning of individual words the model could more easily generalize to unseen words.