How Recurrent Neural Networks Teach Computers to Read

Memory and context play a huge role in helping humans interpret the world. If you encounter a word like "spring" while reading, you don't usually have to ask yourself whether it's a verb meaning "to jump," or a noun referring to the season after winter, or another noun referring to a coil of metal, because the context of the sentence makes it clear. But as with many tasks, what's effortless for humans can be incredibly difficult for computers. We've spent a good deal of time looking at various types of neural networks and their applications. We started with feedforward networks and their ability to sort and label objects based on shared characteristics, and then we explored convolutional networks, which are particularly well-suited to decoding images.