  Learning word representations has recently seen much success in computational
linguistics. However, assuming sequences of word tokens as input to linguistic
analysis is often unjustified. For many languages word segmentation is a
non-trivial task and naturally occurring text is sometimes a mixture of natural
language strings and other character data. We propose to learn text
representations directly from raw character sequences by training a Simple
recurrent Network to predict the next character in text. The network uses its
hidden layer to evolve abstract representations of the character sequences it
sees. To demonstrate the usefulness of the learned text embeddings, we use them
as features in a supervised character level text segmentation and labeling
task: recognizing spans of text containing programming language code. By using
the embeddings as features we are able to substantially improve over a baseline
which uses only surface character n-grams.
