The first thing I did was to use a neural net to calculate the length of a word. I tried two methods, the first design was one input where the value was the length of the word. The second design was there was one input for each length and the values were zero except for the not which has the length. The output in both cases was one node for each length. The first version worked terrible and the second one worked. Lesson was have nodes represent meaning. The weight should just be used to select those nodes.

I am starting a project to use neural nets for processing natural language input. This blog is about describing my experiences. I am sing fann and developing in c++.