  We describe a simple neural language model that relies only on
character-level inputs. Predictions are still made at the word-level. Our model
employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a highway network over
characters, whose output is given to a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent
neural network language model (RNN-LM). On the English Penn Treebank the model
is on par with the existing state-of-the-art despite having 60% fewer
parameters. On languages with rich morphology (Arabic, Czech, French, German,
Spanish, Russian), the model outperforms word-level/morpheme-level LSTM
baselines, again with fewer parameters. The results suggest that on many
languages, character inputs are sufficient for language modeling. Analysis of
word representations obtained from the character composition part of the model
reveals that the model is able to encode, from characters only, both semantic
and orthographic information.
