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arXiv · 2405.04515

A Transformer with Stack Attention

Jiaoda Li·Jennifer C. White·Mrinmaya Sachan·Ryan Cotterell
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Abstract

Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free language tasks. In an attempt to address this limitation in the modeling power of transformer-based language models, we propose augmenting them with a differentiable, stack-based attention mechanism. Our stack-based attention mechanism can be incorporated into any transformer-based language model and adds a level of interpretability to the model. We show that the addition of our stack-based attention mechanism enables the transformer to model some, but not all, deterministic context-free languages.

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Jiaoda Li, Jennifer C. White, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell. 2024-05-07. A Transformer with Stack Attention. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04515

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