  We propose a neural sequence-to-sequence model for direction following, a
task that is essential to realizing effective autonomous agents. Our
alignment-based encoder-decoder model with long short-term memory recurrent
neural networks (LSTM-RNN) translates natural language instructions to action
sequences based upon a representation of the observable world state. We
introduce a multi-level aligner that empowers our model to focus on sentence
"regions" salient to the current world state by using multiple abstractions of
the input sentence. In contrast to existing methods, our model uses no
specialized linguistic resources (e.g., parsers) or task-specific annotations
(e.g., seed lexicons). It is therefore generalizable, yet still achieves the
best results reported to-date on a benchmark single-sentence dataset and
competitive results for the limited-training multi-sentence setting. We analyze
our model through a series of ablations that elucidate the contributions of the
primary components of our model.
