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_31 introduced character information into RNN language models. They applied CNN to character embeddings for word embedding construction. Their proposed method achieved perplexity competitive with the basic LSTM language model @cite_9 even though its parameter size is small. @cite_35 also applied CNN to construct word embeddings from character embeddings. They indicated that CNN also positively affected the LSTM language model in a huge corpus. @cite_33 proposed a method concatenating character embeddings with a word embedding to use character information. In contrast to these methods, we used character @math -gram embeddings to construct word embeddings. To compare the proposed method to these methods, we combined the CNN proposed by @cite_31 with the state-of-the-art LSTM language model (AWD-LSTM) @cite_26 . Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperformed the method using character embeddings (charCNN in Table ).
@cite_35 @cite_26 @cite_33 @cite_9 @cite_31
2259472270 2962832505 1591801644 1938755728
Most word embedding methods take a word as a basic unit and learn embeddings according to words' external contexts, ignoring the internal structures of words. However, in some languages such as Chinese, a word is usually composed of several characters and contains rich internal information. The semantic meaning of a word is also related to the meanings of its composing characters. Hence, we take Chinese for example, and present a character-enhanced word embedding model (CWE). In order to address the issues of character ambiguity and non-compositional words, we propose multiple prototype character embeddings and an effective word selection method. We evaluate the effectiveness of CWE on word relatedness computation and analogical reasoning. The results show that CWE outperforms other baseline methods which ignore internal character information. The codes and data can be accessed from https: github.com Leonard-Xu CWE. We present a Character-Word Long Short-Term Memory Language Model which both reduces the perplexity with respect to a baseline word-level language model and reduces the number of parameters of the model. Character information can reveal structural (dis)similarities between words and can even be used when a word is out-of-vocabulary, thus improving the modeling of infrequent and unknown words. By concatenating word and character embeddings, we achieve up to 2.77 relative improvement on English compared to a baseline model with a similar amount of parameters and 4.57 on Dutch. Moreover, we also outperform baseline word-level models with a larger number of parameters. We describe a simple neural language model that relies only on character-level inputs. Predictions are still made at the word-level. Our model employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a highway network over characters, whose output is given to a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network language model (RNN-LM). On the English Penn Treebank the model is on par with the existing state-of-the-art despite having 60 fewer parameters. On languages with rich morphology (Arabic, Czech, French, German, Spanish, Russian), the model outperforms word-level morpheme-level LSTM baselines, again with fewer parameters. The results suggest that on many languages, character inputs are sufficient for language modeling. Analysis of word representations obtained from the character composition part of the model reveals that the model is able to encode, from characters only, both semantic and orthographic information. We investigate a lattice LSTM network for Chinese word segmentation (CWS) to utilize words or subwords. It integrates the character sequence features with all subsequences information matched from a lexicon. The matched subsequences serve as information shortcut tunnels which link their start and end characters directly. Gated units are used to control the contribution of multiple input links. Through formula derivation and comparison, we show that the lattice LSTM is an extension of the standard LSTM with the ability to take multiple inputs. Previous lattice LSTM model takes word embeddings as the lexicon input, we prove that subword encoding can give the comparable performance and has the benefit of not relying on any external segmentor. The contribution of lattice LSTM comes from both lexicon and pretrained embeddings information, we find that the lexicon information contributes more than the pretrained embeddings information through controlled experiments. Our experiments show that the lattice structure with subword encoding gives competitive or better results with previous state-of-the-art methods on four segmentation benchmarks. Detailed analyses are conducted to compare the performance of word encoding and subword encoding in lattice LSTM. We also investigate the performance of lattice LSTM structure under different circumstances and when this model works or fails. Representation learning is the foundation of machine reading comprehension. In state-of-the-art models, deep learning methods broadly use word and character level representations. However, character is not naturally the minimal linguistic unit. In addition, with a simple concatenation of character and word embedding, previous models actually give suboptimal solution. In this paper, we propose to use subword rather than character for word embedding enhancement. We also empirically explore different augmentation strategies on subword-augmented embedding to enhance the cloze-style reading comprehension model reader. In detail, we present a reader that uses subword-level representation to augment word embedding with a short list to handle rare words effectively. A thorough examination is conducted to evaluate the comprehensive performance and generalization ability of the proposed reader. Experimental results show that the proposed approach helps the reader significantly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines on various public datasets. In this paper, we present a method to leverage radical for learning Chinese character embedding. Radical is a semantic and phonetic component of Chinese character. It plays an important role for modelling character semantics as characters with the same radical usually have similar semantic meaning and grammatical usage. However, most existing character (or word) embedding learning algorithms typically only model the syntactic contexts but ignore the radical information. As a result, they do not explicitly capture the inner semantic connections of characters via radical into the embedding space of characters. To solve this problem, we propose to incorporate the radical information for enhancing the Chinese character embedding. We present a dedicated neural architecture with a hybrid loss function, and integrate the radical information through softmax upon each character. To verify the effectiveness of the learned character embedding, we apply it on Chinese word segmentation. Experiment results on two benchmark datasets show that, our radical-enhanced method outperforms two widely-used context-based embedding learning algorithms. Recent deep learning based approaches have achieved great success on handwriting recognition. Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world. Previous research has mainly focused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters. However, recognition is only one aspect for understanding a language, another challenging and interesting task is to teach a machine to automatically write (pictographic) Chinese characters. In this paper, we propose a framework by using the recurrent neural network (RNN) as both a discriminative model for recognizing Chinese characters and a generative model for drawing (generating) Chinese characters. To recognize Chinese characters, previous methods usually adopt the convolutional neural network (CNN) models which require transforming the online handwriting trajectory into image-like representations. Instead, our RNN based approach is an end-to-end system which directly deals with the sequential structure and does not require any domain-specific knowledge. With the RNN system (combining an LSTM and GRU), state-of-the-art performance can be achieved on the ICDAR-2013 competition database. Furthermore, under the RNN framework, a conditional generative model with character embedding is proposed for automatically drawing recognizable Chinese characters. The generated characters (in vector format) are human-readable and also can be recognized by the discriminative RNN model with high accuracy. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of using RNNs as both generative and discriminative models for the tasks of drawing and recognizing Chinese characters. Bidirectional long short-term memory (bi-LSTM) networks have recently proven successful for various NLP sequence modeling tasks, but little is known about their reliance to input representations, target languages, data set size, and label noise. We address these issues and evaluate bi-LSTMs with word, character, and unicode byte embeddings for POS tagging. We compare bi-LSTMs to traditional POS taggers across languages and data sizes. We also present a novel bi-LSTM model, which combines the POS tagging loss function with an auxiliary loss function that accounts for rare words. The model obtains state-of-the-art performance across 22 languages, and works especially well for morphologically complex languages. Our analysis suggests that bi-LSTMs are less sensitive to training data size and label corruptions (at small noise levels) than previously assumed. We introduce a recurrent neural network language model (RNN-LM) with long short-term memory (LSTM) units that utilizes both character-level and word-level inputs. Our model has a gate that adaptively finds the optimal mixture of the character-level and word-level inputs. The gate creates the final vector representation of a word by combining two distinct representations of the word. The character-level inputs are converted into vector representations of words using a bidirectional LSTM. The word-level inputs are projected into another high-dimensional space by a word lookup table. The final vector representations of words are used in the LSTM language model which predicts the next word given all the preceding words. Our model with the gating mechanism effectively utilizes the character-level inputs for rare and out-of-vocabulary words and outperforms word-level language models on several English corpora. Previous work has modeled the compositionality of words by creating character-level models of meaning, reducing problems of sparsity for rare words. However, in many writing systems compositionality has an effect even on the character-level: the meaning of a character is derived by the sum of its parts. In this paper, we model this effect by creating embeddings for characters based on their visual characteristics, creating an image for the character and running it through a convolutional neural network to produce a visual character embedding. Experiments on a text classification task demonstrate that such model allows for better processing of instances with rare characters in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Additionally, qualitative analyses demonstrate that our proposed model learns to focus on the parts of characters that carry semantic content, resulting in embeddings that are coherent in visual space. Drug-Named Entity Recognition (DNER) for biomedical literature is a fundamental facilitator of Information Extraction. For this reason, the DDIExtraction2011 (DDI2011) and DDIExtraction2013 (DDI2013) challenge introduced one task aiming at recognition of drug names. State-of-the-art DNER approaches heavily rely on hand-engineered features and domain-specific knowledge which are difficult to collect and define. Therefore, we offer an automatic exploring words and characters level features approach: a recurrent neural network using bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) with Conditional Random Fields decoding (LSTM-CRF). Two kinds of word representations are used in this work: word embedding, which is trained from a large amount of text, and character-based representation, which can capture orthographic feature of words. Experimental results on the DDI2011 and DDI2013 dataset show the effect of the proposed LSTM-CRF method. Our method outperforms the best system in the DDI2013 challenge. This paper develops a model that addresses sentence embedding, a hot topic in current natural language processing research, using recurrent neural networks (RNN) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells. The proposed LSTM-RNN model sequentially takes each word in a sentence, extracts its information, and embeds it into a semantic vector. Due to its ability to capture long term memory, the LSTM-RNN accumulates increasingly richer information as it goes through the sentence, and when it reaches the last word, the hidden layer of the network provides a semantic representation of the whole sentence. In this paper, the LSTM-RNN is trained in a weakly supervised manner on user click-through data logged by a commercial web search engine. Visualization and analysis are performed to understand how the embedding process works. The model is found to automatically attenuate the unimportant words and detect the salient keywords in the sentence. Furthermore, these detected keywords are found to automatically activate different cells of the LSTM-RNN, where words belonging to a similar topic activate the same cell. As a semantic representation of the sentence, the embedding vector can be used in many different applications. These automatic keyword detection and topic allocation abilities enabled by the LSTM-RNN allow the network to perform document retrieval, a difficult language processing task, where the similarity between the query and documents can be measured by the distance between their corresponding sentence embedding vectors computed by the LSTM-RNN. On a web search task, the LSTM-RNN embedding is shown to significantly outperform several existing state of the art methods. We emphasize that the proposed model generates sentence embedding vectors that are specially useful for web document retrieval tasks. A comparison with a well known general sentence embedding method, the Paragraph Vector, is performed. The results show that the proposed method in this paper significantly outperforms Paragraph Vector method for web document retrieval task. Bidirectional long short-term memory (biLSTM) networks have recently proven successful for various NLP sequence modeling tasks, but little is known about their reliance to input representations, target languages, data set size, and label noise. We address these issues and evaluate bi-LSTMs with word, character, and unicode byte embeddings for POS tagging. We compare bi-LSTMs to traditional POS taggers across languages and data sizes. We also present a novel biLSTM model, which combines the POS tagging loss function with an auxiliary loss function that accounts for rare words. The model obtains state-of-the-art performance across 22 languages, and works especially well for morphologically complex languages. Our analysis suggests that biLSTMs are less sensitive to training data size and label corruptions (at small noise levels) than previously assumed. Languages using Chinese characters are mostly processed at word level. Inspired by recent success of deep learning, we delve deeper to character and radical levels for Chinese language processing. We propose a new deep learning technique, called “radical embedding”, with justifications based on Chinese linguistics, and validate its feasibility and utility through a set of three experiments: two in-house standard experiments on short-text categorization (STC) and Chinese word segmentation (CWS), and one in-field experiment on search ranking. We show that radical embedding achieves comparable, and sometimes even better, results than competing methods. State-of-the-art methods for learning cross-lingual word embeddings have relied on bilingual dictionaries or parallel corpora. Recent studies showed that the need for parallel data supervision can be alleviated with character-level information. While these methods showed encouraging results, they are not on par with their supervised counterparts and are limited to pairs of languages sharing a common alphabet. In this work, we show that we can build a bilingual dictionary between two languages without using any parallel corpora, by aligning monolingual word embedding spaces in an unsupervised way. Without using any character information, our model even outperforms existing supervised methods on cross-lingual tasks for some language pairs. Our experiments demonstrate that our method works very well also for distant language pairs, like English-Russian or English-Chinese. We finally describe experiments on the English-Esperanto low-resource language pair, on which there only exists a limited amount of parallel data, to show the potential impact of our method in fully unsupervised machine translation. Our code, embeddings and dictionaries are publicly available. This paper describes the neural dependency parser submitted by Stanford to the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task on parsing Universal Dependencies. Our system uses relatively simple LSTM networks to produce part of speech tags and labeled dependency parses from segmented and tokenized sequences of words. In order to address the rare word problem that abounds in languages with complex morphology, we include a character-based word representation that uses an LSTM to produce embeddings from sequences of characters. Our system was ranked first according to all five relevant metrics for the system: UPOS tagging (93.09 ), XPOS tagging (82.27 ), unlabeled attachment score (81.30 ), labeled attachment score (76.30 ), and content word labeled attachment score (72.57 ). We introduce a model for constructing vector representations of words by composing characters using bidirectional LSTMs. Relative to traditional word representation models that have independent vectors for each word type, our model requires only a single vector per character type and a fixed set of parameters for the compositional model. Despite the compactness of this model and, more importantly, the arbitrary nature of the form-function relationship in language, our "composed" word representations yield state-of-the-art results in language modeling and part-of-speech tagging. Benefits over traditional baselines are particularly pronounced in morphologically rich languages (e.g., Turkish). We introduce a model for constructing vector representations of words by composing characters using bidirectional LSTMs. Relative to traditional word representation models that have independent vectors for each word type, our model requires only a single vector per character type and a fixed set of parameters for the compositional model. Despite the compactness of this model and, more importantly, the arbitrary nature of the form‐function relationship in language, our “composed” word representations yield state-of-the-art results in language modeling and part-of-speech tagging. Benefits over traditional baselines are particularly pronounced in morphologically rich languages (e.g., Turkish). Natural language processing (NLP) models often require a massive number of parameters for word embeddings, resulting in a large storage or memory footprint. Deploying neural NLP models to mobile devices requires compressing the word embeddings without any significant sacrifices in performance. For this purpose, we propose to construct the embeddings with few basis vectors. For each word, the composition of basis vectors is determined by a hash code. To maximize the compression rate, we adopt the multi-codebook quantization approach instead of binary coding scheme. Each code is composed of multiple discrete numbers, such as (3, 2, 1, 8), where the value of each component is limited to a fixed range. We propose to directly learn the discrete codes in an end-to-end neural network by applying the Gumbel-softmax trick. Experiments show the compression rate achieves 98 in a sentiment analysis task and 94 99 in machine translation tasks without performance loss. In both tasks, the proposed method can improve the model performance by slightly lowering the compression rate. Compared to other approaches such as character-level segmentation, the proposed method is language-independent and does not require modifications to the network architecture. We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.