  Feedforward Neural Network (FNN)-based language models estimate the
probability of the next word based on the history of the last N words, whereas
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) perform the same task based only on the last
word and some context information that cycles in the network. This paper
presents a novel approach, which bridges the gap between these two categories
of networks. In particular, we propose an architecture which takes advantage of
the explicit, sequential enumeration of the word history in FNN structure while
enhancing each word representation at the projection layer through recurrent
context information that evolves in the network. The context integration is
performed using an additional word-dependent weight matrix that is also learned
during the training. Extensive experiments conducted on the Penn Treebank (PTB)
and the Large Text Compression Benchmark (LTCB) corpus showed a significant
reduction of the perplexity when compared to state-of-the-art feedforward as
well as recurrent neural network architectures.
