An In-Depth Experimental Comparison of RNTNs and CNNs for Sentence Modeling

The goal of modeling sentences is to accurately represent their meaning for different tasks. A variety of deep learning architectures have been proposed to model sentences, however, little is known about their comparative performance on a common ground, across a variety of datasets, and on the same level of optimization. In this paper, we provide such a novel comparison for two popular architectures, Recursive Neural Tensor Networks (RNTNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Although RNTNs have been shown to work well in many cases, they require intensive manual labeling due to the vanishing gradient problem. To enable an extensive comparison of the two architectures, this paper empl…