We also compare to the recent biLSTM-Max Encoder of <cite>Conneau et al. (2017)</cite> , which served as our model's 1-layer starting point. 1 The results indicate that 'Our Shortcut-Stacked Encoder' sur-passes all the previous state-of-the-art encoders, and achieves the new best encoding-based result on SNLI, suggesting the general effectiveness of simple shortcut-connected stacked layers in sentence encoders.