Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a class of artificial neural networks that are well-suited for sequence prediction problems, such as natural language processing (NLP). This tutorial will provide an overview of RNNs and their applications in NLP.

Basic Concepts

RNN Structure

RNNs consist of a series of neurons, where each neuron is connected to the previous and next neurons in the sequence. This allows the network to maintain a form of memory, which is crucial for understanding the context of a sequence.

Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT)

BPTT is a technique used to train RNNs. It involves propagating the error from the output layer back through the network, updating the weights of each neuron in the process.

Applications in NLP

Language Modeling

Language modeling is the task of predicting the next word in a sequence of words. RNNs are particularly effective for this task due to their ability to capture the temporal dependencies in language.

Machine Translation

Machine translation involves translating text from one language to another. RNNs have been used to achieve state-of-the-art results in this domain.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is the task of determining the sentiment of a piece of text, such as a review or a tweet. RNNs can be used to classify text into positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.

Resources

For further reading on RNNs in NLP, you can visit our NLP tutorials page.


Learning More


RNN Architecture