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First published: 2016/12/23 (7 years ago)
Abstract: The pre-dominant approach to language modeling to date is based on recurrent neural networks. In this paper we present a convolutional approach to language modeling. We introduce a novel gating mechanism that eases gradient propagation and which performs better than the LSTM-style gating of (Oord et al, 2016) despite being simpler. We achieve a new state of the art on WikiText-103 as well as a new best single-GPU result on the Google Billion Word benchmark. In settings where latency is important, our model achieves an order of magnitude speed-up compared to a recurrent baseline since computation can be parallelized over time. To our knowledge, this is the first time a non-recurrent approach outperforms strong recurrent models on these tasks.