Recurrent Neural Networks: What, When, How and Where

Introduction

Your smartphone predicting your next word when you are typing, Alexa understanding what you are saying and tasks like making stock market predictions, understanding movie plots, composing music, language translation, and human learning: can you see what the common theme in this list is? These are examples where a sequence of information is crucial.

For example, look at the following sentence:

I like to have a cup of ___ for breakfast.

You are likely to guess that the missing word is coffee. But why didn’t you think of sandwich or ball? Our brains automatically use context, or words earlier in the sentence, to infer the missing word. We are wired to work with sequences of information, and this allows us to learn from experiences — “we are but a ...