Attention: How Words Listen to Each Other

Imagine every word in a sentence is a person sitting around a table.

Each word can hear all the others, but doesn’t listen equally.

Instead, each one decides, “Who is most relevant to me right now?”

This ability to focus on the important parts of the input is called attention.

A Running Example

Take the sentence:

The cat sat on the mat.

Think about the word sat.

To capture its meaning:

• It needs to know who sat → cat
• It may care about where → mat
• It probably doesn’t need much from the or on

So sat will naturally give more attention weight to cat and mat, and less to the other words.

How Each Word Decides