Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for language modeling. In one aspect, a system comprises: a masked convolutional decoder neural network that comprises a plurality of masked convolutional neural network layers and is configured to generate a respective probability distribution over a set of possible target embeddings at each of a plurality of time steps; and a modeling engine that is configured to use the respective probability distribution generated by the decoder neural network at each of the plurality of time steps to estimate a probability that a string represented by the target embeddings corresponding to the plurality of time steps belongs to the natural language.
Processing text sequences using neural networks