Syllabification does not seem to improve word-level RNN language modeling quality when compared to character-based segmentation. However, our best syllable-aware language model, achieving performance comparable to the competitive character-aware model, has 18 -33 fewer parameters and is trained 1.2-2.2 times faster.
The techniques of using neural networks to learn distributed word representations (i.e., word embeddings) have been used to solve a variety of natural language processing tasks. The recently proposed methods, such as CBOW and Skip-gram, have demonstrated their effectiveness in learning word embeddings based on context information such that the obtained word embeddings can capture both semantic and syntactic relationships between words. However, it is quite challenging to produce high-quality word representations for rare or unknown words due to their insufficient context information. In this paper, we propose to leverage morphological knowledge to address this problem. Particularly, we introduce the morphological knowledge as both additional input representation and auxiliary supervision to the neural network framework. As a result, beyond word representations, the proposed neural network model will produce morpheme representations, which can be further employed to infer the representations of rare or unknown words based on their morphological structure. Experiments on an analogical reasoning task and several word similarity tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in producing high-quality words embeddings compared with the state-of-the-art methods. 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 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. This paper presents a scalable method for integrating compositional morphological representations into a vector-based probabilistic language model. Our approach is evaluated in the context of log-bilinear language models, rendered suitably efficient for implementation inside a machine translation decoder by factoring the vocabulary. We perform both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations, presenting results on a range of languages which demonstrate that our model learns morphological representations that both perform well on word similarity tasks and lead to substantial reductions in perplexity. When used for translation into morphologically rich languages with large vocabularies, our models obtain improvements of up to 1.2 BLEU points relative to a baseline system using back-off n-gram models. 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). 