  Neural networks equipped with self-attention have parallelizable computation,
light-weight structure, and the ability to capture both long-range and local
dependencies. Further, their expressive power and performance can be boosted by
using a vector to measure pairwise dependency, but this requires to expand the
alignment matrix to a tensor, which results in memory and computation
bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism called
"Multi-mask Tensorized Self-Attention" (MTSA), which is as fast and as
memory-efficient as a CNN, but significantly outperforms previous
CNN-/RNN-/attention-based models. MTSA 1) captures both pairwise (token2token)
and global (source2token) dependencies by a novel compatibility function
composed of dot-product and additive attentions, 2) uses a tensor to represent
the feature-wise alignment scores for better expressive power but only requires
parallelizable matrix multiplications, and 3) combines multi-head with
multi-dimensional attentions, and applies a distinct positional mask to each
head (subspace), so the memory and computation can be distributed to multiple
heads, each with sequential information encoded independently. The experiments
show that a CNN/RNN-free model based on MTSA achieves state-of-the-art or
competitive performance on nine NLP benchmarks with compelling memory- and
time-efficiency.
