Question: What is a semicharacter architecture?

Evidence:
raw_evidence: Inspired by the psycholinguistic studies BIBREF5 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF7 proposed a semi-character based RNN (ScRNN) that processes a sentence of words with misspelled characters, predicting the correct words at each step. Let $s = \lbrace w_1, w_2, \dots , w_n\rbrace $ denote the input sentence, a sequence of constituent words $w_i$ . Each input word ( $w_i$ ) is represented by concatenating (i) a one hot vector of the first character ( $\mathbf {w_{i1}}$ ); (ii) a one hot representation of the last character ( $\mathbf {w_{il}}$ , where $l$ is the length of word $w_i$ ); and (iii) a bag of characters representation of the internal characters ( $\sum _{j=2}^{l-1}\mathbf {w_{ij}})$ . ScRNN treats the first and the last characters individually, and is agnostic to the ordering of the internal characters. Each word, represented accordingly, is then fed into a BiLSTM cell. At each sequence step, the training target is the correct corresponding word (output dimension equal to vocabulary size), and the model is optimized with cross-entropy loss.
raw_evidence: Third (our primary contribution), we propose a task-agnostic defense, attaching a word recognition model that predicts each word in a sentence given a full sequence of (possibly misspelled) inputs. The word recognition model's outputs form the input to a downstream classification model. Our word recognition models build upon the RNN-based semi-character word recognition model due to BIBREF7 . While our word recognizers are trained on domain-specific text from the task at hand, they often predict UNK at test time, owing to the small domain-specific vocabulary. To handle unobserved and rare words, we propose several backoff strategies including falling back on a generic word recognizer trained on a larger corpus. Incorporating our defenses, BERT models subject to 1-character attacks are restored to $88.3$ , $81.1$ , $78.0$ accuracy for swap, drop, add attacks respectively, as compared to $69.2$ , $63.6$ , and $50.0$ for adversarial training
Inspired by the psycholinguistic studies BIBREF5 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF7 proposed a semi-character based RNN (ScRNN) that processes a sentence of words with misspelled characters, predicting the correct words at each step. Let $s = \lbrace w_1, w_2, \dots , w_n\rbrace $ denote the input sentence, a sequence of constituent words $w_i$ . Each input word ( $w_i$ ) is represented by concatenating (i) a one hot vector of the first character ( $\mathbf {w_{i1}}$ ); (ii) a one hot representation of the last character ( $\mathbf {w_{il}}$ , where $l$ is the length of word $w_i$ ); and (iii) a bag of characters representation of the internal characters ( $\sum _{j=2}^{l-1}\mathbf {w_{ij}})$ . ScRNN treats the first and the last characters individually, and is agnostic to the ordering of the internal characters. Each word, represented accordingly, is then fed into a BiLSTM cell. At each sequence step, the training target is the correct corresponding word (output dimension equal to vocabulary size), and the model is optimized with cross-entropy loss.

Answers:
A semi-character based RNN (ScRNN) treats the first and last characters individually, and is agnostic to the ordering of the internal characters
processes a sentence of words with misspelled characters, predicting the correct words at each step