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Technical GlossaryDeep Learning

Bidirectional RNN

An RNN structure that processes sequence information in both forward and backward directions to provide richer context.

Bidirectional RNN structures attempt to use not only past context but also future context for each time step. This provides strong benefits especially in tagging and analysis tasks where the entire sequence is available beforehand. For example, the meaning of a word may depend on both the preceding and following words. However, because future information is unavailable in real-time stream settings, the approach is not suitable for every scenario.