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Stacked RNNs in NLP

Abhijat Sarari
Python in Plain English
17 min readAug 31, 2023

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a type of neural network architecture that is well-suited for handling sequential data, such as text. In natural language processing (NLP), RNNs are often used for tasks such as language modeling, text generation, and machine translation.

One way to improve the performance of RNNs on these tasks is to stack multiple layers of RNNs on top of each other. This is known as a stacked RNN. In this article, we will discuss the concept of stacked RNNs and how they can be used in NLP.

Recurrent Neural Networks

A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is a type of neural network that is designed to handle sequential data. Unlike traditional feedforward neural networks, which process each input independently, RNNs have a hidden state that is updated at each time step based on the current input and the previous hidden state. This allows the network to maintain a form of memory and capture dependencies between inputs that are separated by time. You can clearly see an illustration below :

Stacked RNNs

A stacked RNN is a neural network architecture that consists of multiple layers of RNNs stacked on top of each other. The output of one layer is fed as input to the next layer. This allows the network to learn more complex representations of the data by combining the information from multiple layers. Each layer’s output serves as the input for the next layer. This stacking enables the network to extract higher-level features and learn complex representations from sequential data. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), stacked RNNs are particularly useful for tasks such as language modeling and machine translation.

In NLP, stacked RNNs are often used for tasks such as language modeling and machine translation. By stacking multiple layers of RNNs, the network can learn more abstract representations of the data, which can improve its performance on these tasks.

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