In the Neural Turing Machine (NTM) architecture, content-based addressing focuses on memory locations based on the similarity between values emitted by the controller and the contents of memory. For both read and write operations, the controller first emits a key vector of length $M$, denoted as $k_t$. This key vector is compared to each memory vector, $M_t(i)$.

This method produces normalized weights, $w_t^c(i)$, using a positive key strength, $\beta_t$: $w_t^c(i) = \frac {\exp(\beta_t K[k_t, M_t(i)])} {\sum_j \exp(\beta_t K[k_t, M_t(j)])}$

The similarity is measured using cosine similarity: $K[u, v] = \frac {u \cdot v} {\|u\| \|v\|}$