LSTM Networks for Sentiment Analysis -- DeepLearning 0.1 documentation

In a traditional recurrent neural network, during the gradient back-propagation phase, the gradient signal can end up being multiplied a large number of times (as many as the number of timesteps) by the weight matrix associated with the connections between the neurons of the recurrent hidden layer. This means that, the magnitude of weights in the transition matrix can have a strong impact on the learning process. If the weights in this matrix are small (or, more formally, if the leading eigenvalue of the weight matrix is smaller than 1.0), it can lead to a situation called vanishing gradients where the gradient signal gets so small that learning either becomes very slow or stops working altogether. It can also make more difficult the task of learning long-term dependencies in the data. Conversely, if the weights in this matrix are large (or, again, more formally, if the leading eigenvalue of the weight matrix is larger than 1.0), it can lead to a situation where the gradient signal is so large that it can cause learning to diverge.