As has already been mentioned, 1D convolutional neural nets can be used for extracting local 1D patches (subsequences) from sequences and can identify local patterns within the window of convolution. And because the same transformation is applied on every patch identified by the window, a pattern learnt at one position can also be recognized at a different position, making 1D conv nets translation invariant.Another interesting use case is to combine 1D conv nets with RNNs. Suppose you have a long sequence to process so long that it cannot be realistically processed by RNNs. In such cases, 1D conv nets can be used as a pre-processing step to make the sequence smaller through downsampling by extracting higher level features, which can, then be passed on to the RNN as input.