Attention Is All You Need
From the written report
The Transformer changed how machines process language. Instead of reading words one after another, attention lets each word connect directly to other words in a sentence. That made training easier to run in parallel.
Read a little further
The paper tested the approach on machine translation. Its strongest model achieved 28.4 BLEU on English-to-German translation, ahead of the previous best result.
Attention also has a cost: comparing every pair of words becomes expensive as a passage gets longer. That trade-off helps explain why handling long documents remains an engineering problem.