scholarly journals Character n-Gram Embeddings to Improve RNN Language Models

Author(s):  
Sho Takase ◽  
Jun Suzuki ◽  
Masaaki Nagata

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 (Wieting et al. 2016). Our proposed method constructs word embeddings from character ngram 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

Author(s):  
Umrinderpal Singh

A language model provides connection to the decoding process to determine a precise word from several available options in the information base or phrase table. The language model can be generated using n-gram approach. Various language models and smoothing procedures are there to determine this model, like unigram, bigram, trigram, interpolation, backoff language model etc. We have done some experiments with different language models where we have used phrases in place of words as the smallest unit. Experiments have shown that phrase based language model yield more accurate results as compared to simple word based mode. We have also done some experiments with machine translation system where we have used phrase based language model rather than word based model and system yield great improvement.


2017 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peyman Passban ◽  
Qun Liu ◽  
Andy Way

Abstract Treating morphologically complex words (MCWs) as atomic units in translation would not yield a desirable result. Such words are complicated constituents with meaningful subunits. A complex word in a morphologically rich language (MRL) could be associated with a number of words or even a full sentence in a simpler language, which means the surface form of complex words should be accompanied with auxiliary morphological information in order to provide a precise translation and a better alignment. In this paper we follow this idea and propose two different methods to convey such information for statistical machine translation (SMT) models. In the first model we enrich factored SMT engines by introducing a new morphological factor which relies on subword-aware word embeddings. In the second model we focus on the language-modeling component. We explore a subword-level neural language model (NLM) to capture sequence-, word- and subword-level dependencies. Our NLM is able to approximate better scores for conditional word probabilities, so the decoder generates more fluent translations. We studied two languages Farsi and German in our experiments and observed significant improvements for both of them.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 329-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joris Pelemans ◽  
Noam Shazeer ◽  
Ciprian Chelba

We present Sparse Non-negative Matrix (SNM) estimation, a novel probability estimation technique for language modeling that can efficiently incorporate arbitrary features. We evaluate SNM language models on two corpora: the One Billion Word Benchmark and a subset of the LDC English Gigaword corpus. Results show that SNM language models trained with n-gram features are a close match for the well-established Kneser-Ney models. The addition of skip-gram features yields a model that is in the same league as the state-of-the-art recurrent neural network language models, as well as complementary: combining the two modeling techniques yields the best known result on the One Billion Word Benchmark. On the Gigaword corpus further improvements are observed using features that cross sentence boundaries. The computational advantages of SNM estimation over both maximum entropy and neural network estimation are probably its main strength, promising an approach that has large flexibility in combining arbitrary features and yet scales gracefully to large amounts of data.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEYI XIONG ◽  
MIN ZHANG

AbstractThe language model is one of the most important knowledge sources for statistical machine translation. In this article, we present two extensions to standard n-gram language models in statistical machine translation: a backward language model that augments the conventional forward language model, and a mutual information trigger model which captures long-distance dependencies that go beyond the scope of standard n-gram language models. We introduce algorithms to integrate the two proposed models into two kinds of state-of-the-art phrase-based decoders. Our experimental results on Chinese/Spanish/Vietnamese-to-English show that both models are able to significantly improve translation quality in terms of BLEU and METEOR over a competitive baseline.


2014 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baltescu Paul ◽  
Blunsom Phil ◽  
Hoang Hieu

Abstract This paper presents an open source implementation1 of a neural language model for machine translation. Neural language models deal with the problem of data sparsity by learning distributed representations for words in a continuous vector space. The language modelling probabilities are estimated by projecting a word's context in the same space as the word representations and by assigning probabilities proportional to the distance between the words and the context's projection. Neural language models are notoriously slow to train and test. Our framework is designed with scalability in mind and provides two optional techniques for reducing the computational cost: the so-called class decomposition trick and a training algorithm based on noise contrastive estimation. Our models may be extended to incorporate direct n-gram features to learn weights for every n-gram in the training data. Our framework comes with wrappers for the cdec and Moses translation toolkits, allowing our language models to be incorporated as normalized features in their decoders (inside the beam search).


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8766-8774 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Schick ◽  
Hinrich Schütze

Pretraining deep neural network architectures with a language modeling objective has brought large improvements for many natural language processing tasks. Exemplified by BERT, a recently proposed such architecture, we demonstrate that despite being trained on huge amounts of data, deep language models still struggle to understand rare words. To fix this problem, we adapt Attentive Mimicking, a method that was designed to explicitly learn embeddings for rare words, to deep language models. In order to make this possible, we introduce one-token approximation, a procedure that enables us to use Attentive Mimicking even when the underlying language model uses subword-based tokenization, i.e., it does not assign embeddings to all words. To evaluate our method, we create a novel dataset that tests the ability of language models to capture semantic properties of words without any task-specific fine-tuning. Using this dataset, we show that adding our adapted version of Attentive Mimicking to BERT does substantially improve its understanding of rare words.


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