One of the main challenges in ranking is embedding the query and document pairs into a joint feature space, which can then be fed to a learning-to-rank algorithm. To achieve this representation, the conventional state of the art approaches perform extensive feature engineering that encode the similarity of the query-answer pair. Recently, deep-learning solutions have shown that it is possible to achieve comparable performance, in some settings, by learning the similarity representation directly from data. Unfortunately, previous models perform poorly on longer texts, or on texts with significant portion of irrelevant information, or which are grammatically incorrect. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel ranking algorithm for question answering, QARAT, which uses an attention mechanism to learn on which words and phrases to focus when building the mutual representation. We demonstrate superior ranking performance on several real-world question-answer ranking datasets, and provide visualization of the attention mechanism to otter more insights into how our models of attention could benefit ranking for difficult question answering challenges.
 How to model a pair of sentences is a critical issue in many NLP tasks such as answer selection (AS), paraphrase identification (PI) and textual entailment (TE). Most prior work (i) deals with one individual task by fine-tuning a specific system; (ii) models each sentence's representation separately, rarely considering the impact of the other sentence; or (iii) relies fully on manually designed, task-specific linguistic features. This work presents a general Attention Based Convolutional Neural Network (ABCNN) for modeling a pair of sentences. We make three contributions. (i) ABCNN can be applied to a wide variety of tasks that require modeling of sentence pairs. (ii) We propose three attention schemes that integrate mutual influence between sentences into CNN; thus, the representation of each sentence takes into consideration its counterpart. These interdependent sentence pair representations are more powerful than isolated sentence representations. (iii) ABCNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on AS, PI and TE tasks. We describe a model based on a Boltzmann machine with third-order connections that can learn how to accumulate information about a shape over several fixations. The model uses a retina that only has enough high resolution pixels to cover a small area of the image, so it must decide on a sequence of fixations and it must combine the "glimpse" at each fixation with the location of the fixation before integrating the information with information from other glimpses of the same object. We evaluate this model on a synthetic dataset and two image classification datasets, showing that it can perform at least as well as a model trained on whole images. Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.