No Arabic abstract
Recurrent neural language models are the state-of-the-art models for language modeling. When the vocabulary size is large, the space taken to store the model parameters becomes the bottleneck for the use of recurrent neural language models. In this paper, we introduce a simple space compression method that randomly shares the structured parameters at both the input and output embedding layers of the recurrent neural language models to significantly reduce the size of model parameters, but still compactly represent the original input and output embedding layers. The method is easy to implement and tune. Experiments on several data sets show that the new method can get similar perplexity and BLEU score results while only using a very tiny fraction of parameters.
We propose Diverse Embedding Neural Network (DENN), a novel architecture for language models (LMs). A DENNLM projects the input word history vector onto multiple diverse low-dimensional sub-spaces instead of a single higher-dimensional sub-space as in conventional feed-forward neural network LMs. We encourage these sub-spaces to be diverse during network training through an augmented loss function. Our language modeling experiments on the Penn Treebank data set show the performance benefit of using a DENNLM.
We present a new theoretical perspective of data noising in recurrent neural network language models (Xie et al., 2017). We show that each variant of data noising is an instance of Bayesian recurrent neural networks with a particular variational distribution (i.e., a mixture of Gaussians whose weights depend on statistics derived from the corpus such as the unigram distribution). We use this insight to propose a more principled method to apply at prediction time and propose natural extensions to data noising under the variational framework. In particular, we propose variational smoothing with tied input and output embedding matrices and an element-wise variational smoothing method. We empirically verify our analysis on two benchmark language modeling datasets and demonstrate performance improvements over existing data noising methods.
Many tasks, including language generation, benefit from learning the structure of the output space, particularly when the space of output labels is large and the data is sparse. State-of-the-art neural language models indirectly capture the output space structure in their classifier weights since they lack parameter sharing across output labels. Learning shared output label mappings helps, but existing methods have limited expressivity and are prone to overfitting. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of more powerful shared mappings for output labels, and propose a deep residual output mapping with dropout between layers to better capture the structure of the output space and avoid overfitting. Evaluations on three language generation tasks show that our output label mapping can match or improve state-of-the-art recurrent and self-attention architectures, and suggest that the classifier does not necessarily need to be high-rank to better model natural language if it is better at capturing the structure of the output space.
Recurrent Neural Network Transducer (RNN-T), like most end-to-end speech recognition model architectures, has an implicit neural network language model (NNLM) and cannot easily leverage unpaired text data during training. Previous work has proposed various fusion methods to incorporate external NNLMs into end-to-end ASR to address this weakness. In this paper, we propose extensions to these techniques that allow RNN-T to exploit external NNLMs during both training and inference time, resulting in 13-18% relative Word Error Rate improvement on Librispeech compared to strong baselines. Furthermore, our methods do not incur extra algorithmic latency and allow for flexible plug-and-play of different NNLMs without re-training. We also share in-depth analysis to better understand the benefits of the different NNLM fusion methods. Our work provides a reliable technique for leveraging unpaired text data to significantly improve RNN-T while keeping the system streamable, flexible, and lightweight.
Recurrent neural networks have proved to be an effective method for statistical language modeling. However, in practice their memory and run-time complexity are usually too large to be implemented in real-time offline mobile applications. In this paper we consider several compression techniques for recurrent neural networks including Long-Short Term Memory models. We make particular attention to the high-dimensional output problem caused by the very large vocabulary size. We focus on effective compression methods in the context of their exploitation on devices: pruning, quantization, and matrix decomposition approaches (low-rank factorization and tensor train decomposition, in particular). For each model we investigate the trade-off between its size, suitability for fast inference and perplexity. We propose a general pipeline for applying the most suitable methods to compress recurrent neural networks for language modeling. It has been shown in the experimental study with the Penn Treebank (PTB) dataset that the most efficient results in terms of speed and compression-perplexity balance are obtained by matrix decomposition techniques.