We address for the first time unsupervised training for a translation task with hundreds of thousands of vocabulary words. We scale up the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to learn a large translation table without any parallel text or seed lexicon. First, we solve the memory bottleneck and enforce the sparsity with a simple thresholding scheme for the lexicon. Second, we initialize the lexicon training with word classes, which efficiently boosts the performance. Our methods produced promising results on two large-scale unsupervised translation tasks.
Our problem is also related to with hidden Markov model (HMM). To the best of our knowledge, there is no published work on HMM training for a 100k-size discrete space. HMM taggers are often integrated with sparse priors @cite_16 @cite_5 , which is not readily possible in a large vocabulary setting due to the memory bottleneck.
@cite_5 @cite_16
2887688727 2152239535 1570013475 2125964738
Recently, hidden Markov models (HMMs) have achieved promising results for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition. However, due to the large vocabulary of Chinese characters with each modeled by a uniform and fixed number of hidden states, a high demand of memory and computation is required. In this study, to address this issue, we present parsimonious HMMs via the state tying which can fully utilize the similarities among different Chinese characters. Two-step algorithm with the data-driven question-set is adopted to generate the tied-state pool using the likelihood measure. The proposed parsimonious HMMs with both Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and deep neural networks (DNNs) as the emission distributions not only lead to a compact model but also improve the recognition accuracy via the data sharing for the tied states and the confusion decreasing among state classes. Tested on ICDAR-2013 competition database, in the best configured case, the new parsimonious DNN-HMM can yield a relative character error rate (CER) reduction of 6.2 , 25 reduction of model size and 60 reduction of decoding time over the conventional DNN-HMM. In the compact setting case of average 1-state HMM, our parsimonious DNN-HMM significantly outperforms the conventional DNN-HMM with a relative CER reduction of 35.5 . We present algorithms for coupling and training hidden Markov models (HMMs) to model interacting processes, and demonstrate their superiority to conventional HMMs in a vision task classifying two-handed actions. HMMs are perhaps the most successful framework in perceptual computing for modeling and classifying dynamic behaviors, popular because they offer dynamic time warping, a training algorithm and a clear Bayesian semantics. However the Markovian framework makes strong restrictive assumptions about the system generating the signal-that it is a single process having a small number of states and an extremely limited state memory. The single-process model is often inappropriate for vision (and speech) applications, resulting in low ceilings on model performance. Coupled HMMs provide an efficient way to resolve many of these problems, and offer superior training speeds, model likelihoods, and robustness to initial conditions. This paper investigates why the HMMs estimated by Expectation-Maximization (EM) produce such poor results as Part-of-Speech (POS) taggers. We find that the HMMs estimated by EM generally assign a roughly equal number of word tokens to each hidden state, while the empirical distribution of tokens to POS tags is highly skewed. This motivates a Bayesian approach using a sparse prior to bias the estimator toward such a skewed distribution. We investigate Gibbs Sampling (GS) and Variational Bayes (VB) estimators and show that VB converges faster than GS for this task and that VB significantly improves 1-to-1 tagging accuracy over EM. We also show that EM does nearly as well as VB when the number of hidden HMM states is dramatically reduced. We also point out the high variance in all of these estimators, and that they require many more iterations to approach convergence than usually thought. The context-independent deep belief network (DBN) hidden Markov model (HMM) hybrid architecture has recently achieved promising results for phone recognition. In this work, we propose a context-dependent DBN-HMM system that dramatically outperforms strong Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-HMM baselines on a challenging, large vocabulary, spontaneous speech recognition dataset from the Bing mobile voice search task. Our system achieves absolute sentence accuracy improvements of 5.8 and 9.2 over GMM-HMMs trained using the minimum phone error rate (MPE) and maximum likelihood (ML) criteria, respectively, which translate to relative error reductions of 16.0 and 23.2 .