  In NLP, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have benefited less than
recurrent neural networks (RNNs) from attention mechanisms. We hypothesize that
this is because the attention in CNNs has been mainly implemented as attentive
pooling (i.e., it is applied to pooling) rather than as attentive convolution
(i.e., it is integrated into convolution). Convolution is the differentiator of
CNNs in that it can powerfully model the higher-level representation of a word
by taking into account its local fixed-size context in the input text t^x. In
this work, we propose an attentive convolution network, ATTCONV. It extends the
context scope of the convolution operation, deriving higher-level features for
a word not only from local context, but also information extracted from
nonlocal context by the attention mechanism commonly used in RNNs. This
nonlocal context can come (i) from parts of the input text t^x that are distant
or (ii) from extra (i.e., external) contexts t^y. Experiments on sentence
modeling with zero-context (sentiment analysis), single-context (textual
entailment) and multiple-context (claim verification) demonstrate the
effectiveness of ATTCONV in sentence representation learning with the
incorporation of context. In particular, attentive convolution outperforms
attentive pooling and is a strong competitor to popular attentive RNNs.
