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A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing (2015) (arxiv.org)
134 points by RobbieStats on Aug 14, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | 3 comments on HN

In plain words: A tutorial that walks language researchers through the neural network building blocks used for text: how words become numbers, and how simple layered, convolutional, recurrent, and recursive networks process them. It also explains the computation graph, which automatically figures out how to nudge a network's settings.

Abstract · A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing

Over the past few years, neural networks have re-emerged as powerful machine-learning models, yielding state-of-the-art results in fields such as image recognition and speech processing. More recently, neural network models started to be applied also to textual natural language signals, again with very promising results. This tutorial surveys neural network models from the perspective of natural language processing research, in an attempt to bring natural-language researchers up to speed with the neural techniques. The tutorial covers input encoding for natural language tasks, feed-forward networks, convolutional networks, recurrent networks and recursive networks, as well as the computation graph abstraction for automatic gradient computation.

Yoav Goldberg
arXiv:1510.00726 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 2, 2015
abstract · pdf · html

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Also discussed: Oct 2015 (2 points, 0 comments)

Goldberg also expanded this paper into a book. http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00762ED1V01Y2...
It's great to have this all in one place - the change in notation across papers can be quite confusing!

I just wish there was something like this with code examples. It's so frustrating when papers say things like 'we omit biases' and so on because it makes it difficult to reproduce their implementation arghghg.

That's intentional; it's where you spend most of the time and won't be competitive with the authors and their market-ready implementation. However you get to learn cool stuff and can make something better based on it.