What is so exciting about recurrent neural networks?
Coming from a mathematics background, in my rather hectic career I have seen many different trends, particularly during the last few years, which all sound very similar to me: "you have a problem? wavelets can save you!", "finite elements are the solution to everything", and similar over-enthusiastic claims.
Of course, each tool has its time and place and, more importantly, an application domain where it excels. I find recurrent neural networks quite interesting for the many features they can achieve:
- Produce consistent markup text (opening and closing tags, recognizing timestamp-like data)
- Write Wikipedia articles with references, and create URLs from non-existing addresses, by learning what a URL should look like
- Create credible-looking scientific papers from LaTeX
All these amazing features are possible without the network having any context information or metadata. In particular, without knowing English, nor what a URL or a bit of LaTeX...
