This paper proposes a novel Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) language model that takes advantage of character information. We focus on character n-grams based on research in the field of word embedding construction ( 2016). Our proposed method constructs word embeddings from character n-gram embeddings and combines them with ordinary word embeddings. We demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best perplexities on the language modeling datasets: Penn Treebank, WikiText-2, and WikiText-103. Moreover, we conduct experiments on application tasks: machine translation and headline generation. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method also positively affects these tasks.
@cite_10 introduced RNN into language modeling to handle arbitrary-length sequences in computing conditional probability @math . They demonstrated that the RNN language model outperformed the Kneser-Ney smoothed 5-gram language model @cite_3 , which is a sophisticated @math -gram language model.
@cite_10 @cite_3
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We survey the most widely-used algorithms for smoothing models for language n -gram modeling. We then present an extensive empirical comparison of several of these smoothing techniques, including those described by Jelinek and Mercer (1980); Katz (1987); Bell, Cleary and Witten (1990); Ney, Essen and Kneser (1994), and Kneser and Ney (1995). We investigate how factors such as training data size, training corpus (e.g. Brown vs. Wall Street Journal), count cutoffs, and n -gram order (bigram vs. trigram) affect the relative performance of these methods, which is measured through the cross-entropy of test data. We find that these factors can significantly affect the relative performance of models, with the most significant factor being training data size. Since no previous comparisons have examined these factors systematically, this is the first thorough characterization of the relative performance of various algorithms. In addition, we introduce methodologies for analyzing smoothing algorithm efficacy in detail, and using these techniques we motivate a novel variation of Kneser?Ney smoothing that consistently outperforms all other algorithms evaluated. Finally, results showing that improved language model smoothing leads to improved speech recognition performance are presented. We propose a new benchmark corpus to be used for measuring progress in statistical language modeling. With almost one billion words of training data, we hope this benchmark will be useful to quickly evaluate novel language modeling techniques, and to compare their contribution when combined with other advanced techniques. We show performance of several well-known types of language models, with the best results achieved with a recurrent neural network based language model. The baseline unpruned Kneser-Ney 5-gram model achieves perplexity 67.6; a combination of techniques leads to 35 reduction in perplexity, or 10 reduction in cross-entropy (bits), over that baseline. The benchmark is available as a code.google.com project; besides the scripts needed to rebuild the training held-out data, it also makes available log-probability values for each word in each of ten held-out data sets, for each of the baseline n-gram models. In practice, training language models for individual authors is often expensive because of limited data resources. In such cases, Neural Network Language Models (NNLMs), generally outperform the traditional non-parametric N-gram models. Here we investigate the performance of a feedforward NNLM on an authorship attribution problem, with moderate author set size and relatively limited data. We also consider how the text topics impact performance. Compared with a well-constructed N-gram baseline method with Kneser-Ney smoothing, the proposed method achieves nearly 2.5 reduction in perplexity and increases author classification accuracy by 3.43 on average, given as few as 5 test sentences. The performance is very competitive with the state of the art in terms of accuracy and demand on test data. The source code, preprocessed datasets, a detailed description of the methodology and results are available at https: github.com zge authorship-attribution. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a very recent technique to model long range dependencies in natural languages. They have clearly outperformed trigrams and other more advanced language modeling techniques by using non-linearly modeling long range dependencies. An alternative is to use log-linear interpolation of skip models (i.e. skip bigrams and skip trigrams). The method as such has been published earlier. In this paper we investigate the impact of different smoothing techniques on the skip models as a measure of their overall performance. One option is to use automatically trained distance clusters (both hard and soft) to increase robustness and to combat sparseness in the skip model. We also investigate alternative smoothing techniques on word level. For skip bigrams when skipping a small number of words Kneser-Ney smoothing (KN) is advantageous. For a larger number of words being skipped Dirichlet smoothing performs better. In order to exploit the advantages of both KN and Dirichlet smoothing we propose a new unified smoothing technique. Experiments are performed on four Babel languages: Cantonese, Pashto, Tagalog and Turkish. RNNs and log-linearly interpolated skip models are on par if the skip models are trained with standard smoothing techniques. Using the improved smoothing of the skip models along with distance clusters, we can clearly outperform RNNs by about 8-11 in perplexity across all four languages. A new recurrent neural network based language model (RNN LM) with applications to speech recognition is presented. Results indicate that it is possible to obtain around 50 reduction of perplexity by using mixture of several RNN LMs, compared to a state of the art backoff language model. Speech recognition experiments show around 18 reduction of word error rate on the Wall Street Journal task when comparing models trained on the same amount of data, and around 5 on the much harder NIST RT05 task, even when the backoff model is trained on much more data than the RNN LM. We provide ample empirical evidence to suggest that connectionist language models are superior to standard n-gram techniques, except their high computational (training) complexity. Index Terms: language modeling, recurrent neural networks, speech recognition In the past several years, a number of different language modeling improvements over simple trigram models have been found, including caching, higher-order n -grams, skipping, interpolated Kneser?Ney smoothing, and clustering. We present explorations of variations on, or of the limits of, each of these techniques, including showing that sentence mixture models may have more potential. While all of these techniques have been studied separately, they have rarely been studied in combination. We compare a combination of all techniques together to a Katz smoothed trigram model with no count cutoffs. We achieve perplexity reductions between 38 and 50 (1 bit of entropy), depending on training data size, as well as a word error rate reduction of 8.9 . Our perplexity reductions are perhaps the highest reported compared to a fair baseline. Research in speech recognition and machine translation is boosting the use of large scale n-gram language models. We present an open source toolkit that permits to efficiently handle language models with billions of n-grams on conventional machines. The IRSTLM toolkit supports distribution of ngram collection and smoothing over a computer cluster, language model compression through probability quantization, lazy-loading of huge language models from disk. IRSTLM has been so far successfully deployed with the Moses toolkit for statistical machine translation and with the FBK-irst speech recognition system. Efficiency of the tool is reported on a speech transcription task of Italian political speeches using a language model of 1.1 billion four-grams. Many of the current state-of-the-art Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Systems (LVCSR) are hybrids of neural networks and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Most of these systems contain separate components that deal with the acoustic modelling, language modelling and sequence decoding. We investigate a more direct approach in which the HMM is replaced with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that performs sequence prediction directly at the character level. Alignment between the input features and the desired character sequence is learned automatically by an attention mechanism built into the RNN. For each predicted character, the attention mechanism scans the input sequence and chooses relevant frames. We propose two methods to speed up this operation: limiting the scan to a subset of most promising frames and pooling over time the information contained in neighboring frames, thereby reducing source sequence length. Integrating an n-gram language model into the decoding process yields recognition accuracies similar to other HMM-free RNN-based approaches. Many state-of-the-art Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) Systems are hybrids of neural networks and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Recently, more direct end-to-end methods have been investigated, in which neural architectures were trained to model sequences of characters [1,2]. To our knowledge, all these approaches relied on Connectionist Temporal Classification [3] modules. We investigate an alternative method for sequence modelling based on an attention mechanism that allows a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to learn alignments between sequences of input frames and output labels. We show how this setup can be applied to LVCSR by integrating the decoding RNN with an n-gram language model and by speeding up its operation by constraining selections made by the attention mechanism and by reducing the source sequence lengths by pooling information over time. Recognition accuracies similar to other HMM-free RNN-based approaches are reported for the Wall Street Journal corpus. Training neural network language models over large vocabularies is still computationally very costly compared to count-based models such as Kneser-Ney. At the same time, neural language models are gaining popularity for many applications such as speech recognition and machine translation whose success depends on scalability. We present a systematic comparison of strategies to represent and train large vocabularies, including softmax, hierarchical softmax, target sampling, noise contrastive estimation and self normalization. We further extend self normalization to be a proper estimator of likelihood and introduce an efficient variant of softmax. We evaluate each method on three popular benchmarks, examining performance on rare words, the speed accuracy trade-off and complementarity to Kneser-Ney. Statistical language models used in large-vocabulary speech recognition must properly encapsulate the various constraints, both local and global, present in the language. While local constraints are readily captured through n-gram modeling, global constraints, such as long-term semantic dependencies, have been more difficult to handle within a data-driven formalism. This paper focuses on the use of latent semantic analysis, a paradigm that automatically uncovers the salient semantic relationships between words and documents in a given corpus. In this approach, (discrete) words and documents are mapped onto a (continuous) semantic vector space, in which familiar clustering techniques can be applied. This leads to the specification of a powerful framework for automatic semantic classification, as well as the derivation of several language model families with various smoothing properties. Because of their large-span nature, these language models are well suited to complement conventional n-grams. An integrative formulation is proposed for harnessing this synergy, in which the latent semantic information is used to adjust the standard n-gram probability. Such hybrid language modeling compares favorably with the corresponding n-gram baseline: experiments conducted on the Wall Street Journal domain show a reduction in average word error rate of over 20 . This paper concludes with a discussion of intrinsic tradeoffs, such as the influence of training data selection on the resulting performance. We propose a new benchmark corpus to be used for measuring progress in statistical language modeling. With almost one billion words of training data, we hope this benchmark will be useful to quickly evaluate novel language modeling techniques, and to compare their contribution when combined with other advanced techniques. We show performance of several well-known types of language models, with the best results achieved with a recurrent neural network based language model. The baseline unpruned KneserNey 5-gram model achieves perplexity 67.6. A combination of techniques leads to 35 reduction in perplexity, or 10 reduction in cross-entropy (bits), over that baseline. The benchmark is available as a code.google.com project; besides the scripts needed to rebuild the training held-out data, it also makes available log-probability values for each word in each of ten held-out data sets, for each of the baseline n-gram models. We propose a Topic Compositional Neural Language Model (TCNLM), a novel method designed to simultaneously capture both the global semantic meaning and the local word ordering structure in a document. The TCNLM learns the global semantic coherence of a document via a neural topic model, and the probability of each learned latent topic is further used to build a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model, where each expert (corresponding to one topic) is a recurrent neural network (RNN) that accounts for learning the local structure of a word sequence. In order to train the MoE model efficiently, a matrix factorization method is applied, by extending each weight matrix of the RNN to be an ensemble of topic-dependent weight matrices. The degree to which each member of the ensemble is used is tied to the document-dependent probability of the corresponding topics. Experimental results on several corpora show that the proposed approach outperforms both a pure RNN-based model and other topic-guided language models. Further, our model yields sensible topics, and also has the capacity to generate meaningful sentences conditioned on given topics. In this paper, we propose TopicRNN, a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based language model designed to directly capture the global semantic meaning relating words in a document via latent topics. Because of their sequential nature, RNNs are good at capturing the local structure of a word sequence - both semantic and syntactic - but might face difficulty remembering long-range dependencies. Intuitively, these long-range dependencies are of semantic nature. In contrast, latent topic models are able to capture the global underlying semantic structure of a document but do not account for word ordering. The proposed TopicRNN model integrates the merits of RNNs and latent topic models: it captures local (syntactic) dependencies using an RNN and global (semantic) dependencies using latent topics. Unlike previous work on contextual RNN language modeling, our model is learned end-to-end. Empirical results on word prediction show that TopicRNN outperforms existing contextual RNN baselines. In addition, TopicRNN can be used as an unsupervised feature extractor for documents. We do this for sentiment analysis on the IMDB movie review dataset and report an error rate of @math . This is comparable to the state-of-the-art @math resulting from a semi-supervised approach. Finally, TopicRNN also yields sensible topics, making it a useful alternative to document models such as latent Dirichlet allocation. This paper investigates the scaling properties of Recurrent Neural Network Language Models (RNNLMs). We discuss how to train very large RNNs on GPUs and address the questions of how RNNLMs scale with respect to model size, training-set size, computational costs and memory. Our analysis shows that despite being more costly to train, RNNLMs obtain much lower perplexities on standard benchmarks than n-gram models. We train the largest known RNNs and present relative word error rates gains of 18 on an ASR task. We also present the new lowest perplexities on the recently released billion word language modelling benchmark, 1 BLEU point gain on machine translation and a 17 relative hit rate gain in word prediction. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an efficacious treatment for substance use disorders and other problem behaviors (Lundahl and Burke, 2009). However, little is known about the specific mechanisms that drive therapeutic change. A growing body of research has focused on coding within-session language to better understand how therapist and patient language mutually influence each other and predict successful (or unsuccessful) treatment outcomes. These studies typically use human raters, requiring considerable financial, time, and training costs for conducting such research. This paper describes the development and testing of a recursive neural network (RNN) model for rating 78,977 therapist and patient talk turns across 356 MI sessions. We assessed the accuracy of RNNs in predicting human ratings for client speech and compared them to standard n-gram models. The RNN model showed improvement over ngram models for some codes, but overall, all of the models performed well below human reliability, demonstrating the difficulty of the task. Continuous word representations, trained on large unlabeled corpora are useful for many natural language processing tasks. Popular models that learn such representations ignore the morphology of words, by assigning a distinct vector to each word. This is a limitation, especially for languages with large vocabularies and many rare words. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on the skipgram model, where each word is represented as a bag of character @math -grams. A vector representation is associated to each character @math -gram; words being represented as the sum of these representations. Our method is fast, allowing to train models on large corpora quickly and allows us to compute word representations for words that did not appear in the training data. We evaluate our word representations on nine different languages, both on word similarity and analogy tasks. By comparing to recently proposed morphological word representations, we show that our vectors achieve state-of-the-art performance on these tasks. In recent years, variants of a neural network architecture for statistical language modeling have been proposed and successfully applied, e.g. in the language modeling component of speech recognizers. The main advantage of these architectures is that they learn an embedding for words (or other symbols) in a continuous space that helps to smooth the language model and provide good generalization even when the number of training examples is insufficient. However, these models are extremely slow in comparison to the more commonly used n-gram models, both for training and recognition. As an alternative to an importance sampling method proposed to speed-up training, we introduce a hierarchical decomposition of the conditional probabilities that yields a speed-up of about 200 both during training and recognition. The hierarchical decomposition is a binary hierarchical clustering constrained by the prior knowledge extracted from the WordNet semantic hierarchy. Previous work on statistical language modeling has shown that it is possible to train a feedforward neural network to approximate probabilities over sequences of words, resulting in significant error reduction when compared to standard baseline models based on n-grams. However, training the neural network model with the maximum-likelihood criterion requires computations proportional to the number of words in the vocabulary. In this paper, we introduce adaptive importance sampling as a way to accelerate training of the model. The idea is to use an adaptive n-gram model to track the conditional distributions produced by the neural network. We show that a very significant speedup can be obtained on standard problems. This paper introduces a neural model for concept-to-text generation that scales to large, rich domains. We experiment with a new dataset of biographies from Wikipedia that is an order of magnitude larger than existing resources with over 700k samples. The dataset is also vastly more diverse with a 400k vocabulary, compared to a few hundred words for Weathergov or Robocup. Our model builds upon recent work on conditional neural language model for text generation. To deal with the large vocabulary, we extend these models to mix a fixed vocabulary with copy actions that transfer sample-specific words from the input database to the generated output sentence. Our neural model significantly out-performs a classical Kneser-Ney language model adapted to this task by nearly 15 BLEU.