In the equation，$i_t, f_t, c_t, o_t$ stand for input gate, forget gate, memory cell and output gate, respectively. $W$ and $b$ are model parameters, $\tanh$ is a hyperbolic tangent, and $\odot$ denotes an element-wise product operation. The input gate controls the magnitude of the new input into the memory cell $c$; the forget gate controls the memory propagated from the last time step; the output gate controls the magnitutde of the output. The three gates are computed similarly with different parameters, and they influence memory cell $c$ separately, as shown in Figure 2:
It is noted that the attention mechanism is achieved by a weighted average over the RNN hidden states $h_j$. The weight $a_{ij}$ denotes the strength of attention of the $i$-th word in the target language sentence to the $j$-th word in the source sentence and is calculated as
where $align$ is an alignment model that measures the fitness between the $i$-th word in the target language sentence and the $j$-th word in the source sentence. More concretely, the fitness is computed with the $i$-th hidden state $z_i$ of the decoder RNN and the $j$-th context vector $h_j$ of the source sentence. Hard alignment is used in the conventional alignment model, which means each word in the target language explicitly corresponds to one or more words from the target language sentence. In an attention model, soft alignment is used, where any word in source sentence is related to any word in the target language sentence, where the strength of the relation is a real number computed via the model, thus can be incorporated into the NMT framework and can be trained via back-propagation.
