Maybe. Or maybe some lower layers learn to recognise language, some later layers learn to recognise concepts, some layers above learn to do some sort of reasoni

Maybe. Or maybe some lower layers learn to recognise language, some later layers learn to recognise concepts, some layers above learn to do some sort of reasoning. Perhaps. We have seen behaviour like that in CNNs where basic features were built up on the lower layers. The fact that a single word is output does not imply that the system is only working on that single word. Yes, that's the task and a good way - as a human - to do that task is to think about what you want to say. So the network may do something like that in between.