Papers › TRANS-BLSTM: Transformer with Bidirectional LSTM for Language Understanding

TRANS-BLSTM: Transformer with Bidirectional LSTM for Language Understanding

16 Mar 2020arXiv:2003.07000archive 2025-07-28

Zhiheng Huang, Peng Xu, Davis Liang, Ajay Mishra, Bing Xiang

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of NLP tasks including sentence classification, machine translation, and question answering. The BERT model architecture is derived primarily from the transformer. Prior to the transformer era, bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) has been the dominant modeling architecture for neural machine translation and question answering. In this paper, we investigate how these two modeling techniques can be combined to create a more powerful model architecture. We propose a new architecture denoted as Transformer with BLSTM (TRANS-BLSTM) which has a BLSTM layer integrated to each transformer block, leading to a joint modeling framework for transformer and BLSTM. We show that TRANS-BLSTM models consistently lead to improvements in accuracy compared to BERT baselines in GLUE and SQuAD 1.1 experiments. Our TRANS-BLSTM model obtains an F1 score of 94.01% on the SQuAD 1.1 development dataset, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art result.

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Tasks

Machine TranslationNatural Language InferenceParaphrase IdentificationQuestion AnsweringSentenceSentence ClassificationText ClassificationTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Natural Language Inference QNLI TRANS-BLSTM Accuracy 94.08% #18 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Paraphrase Identification Quora Question Pairs TRANS-BLSTM Accuracy 88.28 #24 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification GLUE MRPC TRANS-BLSTM Accuracy 90.45 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification GLUE RTE TRANS-BLSTM Accuracy 79.78 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification GLUE SST2 TRANS-BLSTM Accuracy 94.38 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight DecayWordPiece

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