Long short-term memory

Long short-term memory (LSTM) is a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture (an artificial neural network) published in 1997 by Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber. Like most RNNs, an LSTM network is universal in the sense that given enough network units it can compute anything a conventional computer can compute, provided it has the proper weight matrix, which may be viewed as its program. Unlike traditional RNNs, an LSTM network is well-suited to learn from experience to classify, process and predict time series when there are very long time lags of unknown size between important events. This is one of the main reasons why LSTM outperforms alternative RNNs and Hidden Markov Models and other sequence learning methods in numerous applications. For example, LSTM achieved the best known results in unsegmented connected handwriting recognition, and in 2009 won the ICDAR handwriting competition. LSTM networks have also been used for automatic speech recognition, and were a major component of a network that in 2013 achieved a record 17.7% phoneme error rate on the classic TIMIT natural speech dataset.