attention

plural attentions

1. uncountableMental focus.

   Please direct your attention to the following words.

   5 more examples

   Most of the pictures of common life that we meet with in books are drawn in the shape of novels, with the view of attracting the attention of indolent readers; the question with authors being, not of what can I inform my neighbour by which he may be improved in head or heart, mind or morals? but what is the fashion of public taste? that by pandering to it I may secure sale and applause! Hence the present jumble of brains, the rack of invention to excite, supply, and cram the public appetite, all so agape after tales of the marvellous, till the picture of life is overwrought, and the image of nature bedaubed to disgust.

   1881, John Younger, “Introductory Chapter”, in Autobiography of John Younger, Shoemaker, St. Boswells, Kelso, Scotland: J. & J.H. Rutherfurd, pages x–xi

   In the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. He never read me any of his manuscripts, […], and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned. But he had then none of the oddities and mannerisms which I hold to be inseparable from genius, and which struck my attention in after days when I came in contact with the Celebrity.

   1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter I, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

   One saint's day in mid-term a certain newly appointed suffragan-bishop came to the school chapel, and there preached on “The Inner Life.” He at once secured attention by his informal method, and when presently the coughing of Jarvis […] interrupted the sermon, he altogether captivated his audience with a remark about cough lozenges being cheap and easily procurable.

   1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter III, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC

   Lesper Killey was at her shoulder, jerking at the wash-faded denim of her jumper to get her attention.

   1959, Mari Sandoz, “Bone Joe and the Smokin' Woman”, in Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings

   But was it responsible governance to pass the Longitude Act without other efforts to protect British seamen? Or might it have been subterfuge—a disingenuous attempt to shift attention away from the realities of their life at sea.

   2012 March 28, William E. Carter, Merri Sue Carter, “The British Longitude Act Reconsidered”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, page 87

   Synonyms: heed, notice

2. countableAn action or remark expressing concern for or interest in someone or something, especially romantic interest.

   For some time past I have been the recipient of very marked attentions from a young lady.

   1910, Stephen Leacock, “How to Avoid Getting Married,”, in Literary Lapses

   1 more example

   She attended her sickbed; her watchful attentions triumphed over the malignity of the distemper.

   1816 June – 1817 April/May (date written), [Mary Shelley], chapter 3, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, published 1 January 1818, →OCLC

3. uncountablegovernmentA state of alertness in the standing position.

   The company will now come to attention.

4. uncountablemachine learningA kind of prioritisation technique in neural networks that assigns soft weights between tokens from two (or more) input sequences in order to compute the required output.

   The attention mechanism is an important part of these models and plays a very crucial role. Before Transformer models, the attention mechanism was proposed as a helper for improving conventional DL models such as RNNs.

   2021, Savas Yildirim, Meysam Asgari-Chenaghlu, Mastering Transformers […] , Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 26

1. governmentUsed as a command to bring soldiers to the attention position.
2. A call for people to be quiet/stop doing what they are presently doing and pay heed to what they are to be told or shown.