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An Introductory Survey on Attention Mechanisms in NLP Problems

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Intelligent Systems and Applications (IntelliSys 2019)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1038))

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Abstract

First derived from human intuition, later adapted to machine translation for automatic token alignment, attention mechanism, a simple method that can be used for encoding sequence data based on the importance score each element is assigned, has been widely applied to and attained significant improvement in various tasks in natural language processing, including sentiment classification, text summarization, question answering, dependency parsing, etc. In this paper, we survey through recent works and conduct an introductory summary of the attention mechanism in different NLP problems, aiming to provide our readers with basic knowledge on this widely used method, discuss its different variants for different tasks, explore its association with other techniques in machine learning, and examine methods for evaluating its performance.

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Correspondence to Dichao Hu .

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Hu, D. (2020). An Introductory Survey on Attention Mechanisms in NLP Problems. In: Bi, Y., Bhatia, R., Kapoor, S. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Applications. IntelliSys 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1038. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29513-4_31

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