It is important to design compact language models for efficient deployment. We improve upon recent advances in both the language modeling domain and the model-compression domain to construct parameter and computation efficient language models. We use an efficient transformer-based architecture with adaptive embedding and softmax, differentiable non-parametric cache, Hebbian softmax, knowledge distillation, network pruning, and low-bit quantization. In this paper, we provide the winning solution to the NeurIPS 2019 MicroNet Challenge in the language modeling track. Compared to the baseline language model provided by the MicroNet Challenge, our model is 90 times more parameter-efficient and 36 times more computation-efficient while achieving the required test perplexity of 35 on the Wikitext-103 dataset. We hope that this work will aid future research into efficient language models, and we have released our full source code at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/neurips-micronet.
Haverford College（哈弗福德学院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been shown to aid in the creation of artificial data in situations where large amounts of real data are difficult to come by. This issue is especially salient in the computational linguistics space, where researchers are often tasked with modeling the complex morphologic and grammatical processes of low-resource languages. This paper will discuss the implementation and testing of a GAN that attempts to model and reproduce the graphotactics of a language using only 100 example strings. These artificial, yet graphotactically compliant, strings are mean…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（数据分析洞察中心）；Aylien Ltd.（Aylien有限公司）；National University of Ireland, Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
Humans continuously adapt their style and language to a variety of domains. However, a reliable definition of `domain' has eluded researchers thus far. Additionally, the notion of discrete domains stands in contrast to the multiplicity of heterogeneous domains that humans navigate, many of which overlap. In order to better understand the change and variation of human language, we draw on research in domain adaptation and extend the notion of discrete domains to the continuous spectrum. We propose representation learning-based models that can adapt to continuous domains and detail how these can…
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）；United International University（联合国际大学）
Though there has been a large body of recent works in language modeling (LM) for high resource languages such as English and Chinese, the area is still unexplored for low resource languages like Bengali and Hindi. We propose an end to end trainable memory efficient CNN architecture named CoCNN to handle specific characteristics such as high inflection, morphological richness, flexible word order and phonetical spelling errors of Bengali and Hindi. In particular, we introduce two learnable convolutional sub-models at word and at sentence level that are end to end trainable. We show that state-o…
Recent advances in neural TTS have led to models that can produce high-quality synthetic speech. However, these models typically require large amounts of training data, which can make it costly to produce a new voice with the desired quality. Although multi-speaker modeling can reduce the data requirements necessary for a new voice, this approach is usually not viable for many low-resource languages for which abundant multi-speaker data is not available. In this paper, we therefore investigated to what extent multilingual multi-speaker modeling can be an alternative to monolingual multi-speake…
Recent work in spoken language modeling shows the possibility of learning a language unsupervisedly from raw audio without any text labels. The approach relies first on transforming the audio into a sequence of discrete units (or pseudo-text) and then training a language model directly on such pseudo-text. Is such a discrete bottleneck necessary, potentially introducing irreversible errors in the encoding of the speech signal, or could we learn a language model without discrete units at all? In this work, we study the role of discrete versus continuous representations in spoken language modeli…
Most language modeling methods rely on large-scale data to statistically learn the sequential patterns of words. In this paper, we argue that words are atomic language units but not necessarily atomic semantic units. Inspired by HowNet, we use sememes, the minimum semantic units in human languages, to represent the implicit semantics behind words for language modeling, named Sememe-Driven Language Model (SDLM). More specifically, to predict the next word, SDLM first estimates the sememe distribution gave textual context. Afterward, it regards each sememe as a distinct semantic expert, and thes…
Spoken Language Systems (LSV)（口语语言系统（LSV））；Collaborative Research Center on Information Density and Linguistic Encoding（信息密度与语言编码合作研究中心）
The goal of language modeling techniques is to capture the statistical and structural properties of natural languages from training corpora. This task typically involves the learning of short range dependencies, which generally model the syntactic properties of a language and/or long range dependencies, which are semantic in nature. We propose in this paper a new multi-span architecture, which separately models the short and long context information while it dynamically merges them to perform the language modeling task. This is done through a novel recurrent Long-Short Range Context (LSRC) net…
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）
Transformer has been widely-used in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and the scaled dot-product attention between tokens is a core module of Transformer. This attention is a token-wise design and its complexity is quadratic to the length of sequence, limiting its application potential for long sequence tasks. In this paper, we propose a dimension-wise attention mechanism based on which a novel language modeling approach (namely TensorCoder) can be developed. The dimension-wise attention can reduce the attention complexity from the original $O(N^2d)$ to $O(Nd^2)$, where $N$ is the l…
We explore deep autoregressive Transformer models in language modeling for speech recognition. We focus on two aspects. First, we revisit Transformer model configurations specifically for language modeling. We show that well configured Transformer models outperform our baseline models based on the shallow stack of LSTM recurrent neural network layers. We carry out experiments on the open-source LibriSpeech 960hr task, for both 200K vocabulary word-level and 10K byte-pair encoding subword-level language modeling. We apply our word-level models to conventional hybrid speech recognition by lattic…
Mila（米拉）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Microsoft Research Montréal（微软蒙特利尔研究院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Syntax is fundamental to our thinking about language. Failing to capture the structure of input language could lead to generalization problems and over-parametrization. In the present work, we propose a new syntax-aware language model: Syntactic Ordered Memory (SOM). The model explicitly models the structure with an incremental parser and maintains the conditional probability setting of a standard language model (left-to-right). To train the incremental parser and avoid exposure bias, we also propose a novel dynamic oracle, so that SOM is more robust to wrong parsing decisions. Experiments sho…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）
Active learning strives to reduce annotation costs by choosing the most critical examples to label. Typically, the active learning strategy is contingent on the classification model. For instance, uncertainty sampling depends on poorly calibrated model confidence scores. In the cold-start setting, active learning is impractical because of model instability and data scarcity. Fortunately, modern NLP provides an additional source of information: pre-trained language models. The pre-training loss can find examples that surprise the model and should be labeled for efficient fine-tuning. Therefore,…
This work applies natural language modeling to generate plausible strategic moves in the ancient game of Go. We train the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT-2) to mimic the style of Go champions as archived in Smart Game Format (SGF), which offers a text description of move sequences. The trained model further generates valid but previously unseen strategies for Go. Because GPT-2 preserves punctuation and spacing, the raw output of the text generator provides inputs to game visualization and creative patterns, such as the Sabaki project's game engine using auto-replays. Results demonstrate…
Deep neural networks are powerful statistical learners. However, their predictions do not come with an explanation of their process. To analyze these models, explanation methods are being developed. We present a novel explanation method, called OLM, for natural language processing classifiers. This method combines occlusion and language modeling, which are techniques central to explainability and NLP, respectively. OLM gives explanations that are theoretically sound and easy to understand. We make several contributions to the theory of explanation methods. Axioms for explanation methods are an…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We incorporate morphological supervision into character language models (CLMs) via multitasking and show that this addition improves bits-per-character (BPC) performance across 24 languages, even when the morphology data and language modeling data are disjoint. Analyzing the CLMs shows that inflected words benefit more from explicitly modeling morphology than uninflected words, and that morphological supervision improves performance even as the amount of language modeling data grows. We then transfer morphological supervision across languages to improve language modeling performance in the low…
Neural language models (LMs) are typically trained using only lexical features, such as surface forms of words. In this paper, we argue this deprives the LM of crucial syntactic signals that can be detected at high confidence using existing parsers. We present a simple but highly effective approach for training neural LMs using both lexical and syntactic information, and a novel approach for applying such LMs to unparsed text using sequential Monte Carlo sampling. In experiments on a range of corpora and corpus sizes, we show our approach consistently outperforms standard lexical LMs in charac…
Capitalization normalization (truecasing) is the task of restoring the correct case (uppercase or lowercase) of noisy text. We propose a fast, accurate and compact two-level hierarchical word-and-character-based recurrent neural network model. We use the truecaser to normalize user-generated text in a Federated Learning framework for language modeling. A case-aware language model trained on this normalized text achieves the same perplexity as a model trained on text with gold capitalization. In a real user A/B experiment, we demonstrate that the improvement translates to reduced prediction err…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Transformers are powerful for sequence modeling. Nearly all state-of-the-art language models and pre-trained language models are based on the Transformer architecture. However, it distinguishes sequential tokens only with the token position index. We hypothesize that better contextual representations can be generated from the Transformer with richer positional information. To verify this, we propose a segment-aware Transformer (Segatron), by replacing the original token position encoding with a combined position encoding of paragraph, sentence, and token. We first introduce the segment-aware m…
Recently, there has been interest in multiplicative recurrent neural networks for language modeling. Indeed, simple Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) encounter difficulties recovering from past mistakes when generating sequences due to high correlation between hidden states. These challenges can be mitigated by integrating second-order terms in the hidden-state update. One such model, multiplicative Long Short-Term Memory (mLSTM) is particularly interesting in its original formulation because of the sharing of its second-order term, referred to as the intermediate state. We explore these archit…
Columbia University in the City of New York（纽约哥伦比亚大学）
We propose a way to use a transformer-based language model in conversational speech recognition. Specifically, we focus on decoding efficiently in a weighted finite-state transducer framework. We showcase an approach to lattice re-scoring that allows for longer range history captured by a transfomer-based language model and takes advantage of a transformer's ability to avoid computing sequentially.
The thesis presents an attempt at using the syntactic structure in natural language for improved language models for speech recognition. The structured language model merges techniques in automatic parsing and language modeling using an original probabilistic parameterization of a shift-reduce parser. A maximum likelihood reestimation procedure belonging to the class of expectation-maximization algorithms is employed for training the model. Experiments on the Wall Street Journal, Switchboard and Broadcast News corpora show improvement in both perplexity and word error rate - word lattice resco…
In this paper, we study how to use masked signal modeling in vision and language (V+L) representation learning. Instead of developing masked language modeling (MLM) and masked image modeling (MIM) independently, we propose to build joint masked vision and language modeling, where the masked signal of one modality is reconstructed with the help from another modality. This is motivated by the nature of image-text paired data that both of the image and the text convey almost the same information but in different formats. The masked signal reconstruction of one modality conditioned on another moda…
The negative sampling (NEG) objective function, used in word2vec, is a simplification of the Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) method. NEG was found to be highly effective in learning continuous word representations. However, unlike NCE, it was considered inapplicable for the purpose of learning the parameters of a language model. In this study, we refute this assertion by providing a principled derivation for NEG-based language modeling, founded on a novel analysis of a low-dimensional approximation of the matrix of pointwise mutual information between the contexts and the predicted words. T…
With a sharp rise in fluency and users of "Hinglish" in linguistically diverse country, India, it has increasingly become important to analyze social content written in this language in platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. This project focuses on using deep learning techniques to tackle a classification problem in categorizing social content written in Hindi-English into Abusive, Hate-Inducing and Not offensive categories. We utilize bi-directional sequence models with easy text augmentation techniques such as synonym replacement, random insertion, random swap, and random deletion to p…
Current language models achieve low perplexity but their resulting generations still suffer from toxic responses, repetitiveness and contradictions. The standard language modeling setup fails to address these issues. In this paper, we introduce a new architecture, {\sc Director}, that consists of a unified generator-classifier with both a language modeling and a classification head for each output token. Training is conducted jointly using both standard language modeling data, and data labeled with desirable and undesirable sequences. Experiments in several settings show that the model has com…
In this work, we propose contextual language models that incorporate dialog level discourse information into language modeling. Previous works on contextual language model treat preceding utterances as a sequence of inputs, without considering dialog interactions. We design recurrent neural network (RNN) based contextual language models that specially track the interactions between speakers in a dialog. Experiment results on Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus show that the proposed model outperforms conventional single turn based RNN language model by 3.3% on perplexity. The proposed models also de…
Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
We focus on the problem of language modeling for code-switched language, in the context of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Language modeling for code-switched language is challenging for (at least) three reasons: (1) lack of available large-scale code-switched data for training; (2) lack of a replicable evaluation setup that is ASR directed yet isolates language modeling performance from the other intricacies of the ASR system; and (3) the reliance on generative modeling. We tackle these three issues: we propose an ASR-motivated evaluation setup which is decoupled from an ASR system and th…
We present power low rank ensembles (PLRE), a flexible framework for n-gram language modeling where ensembles of low rank matrices and tensors are used to obtain smoothed probability estimates of words in context. Our method can be understood as a generalization of n-gram modeling to non-integer n, and includes standard techniques such as absolute discounting and Kneser-Ney smoothing as special cases. PLRE training is efficient and our approach outperforms state-of-the-art modified Kneser Ney baselines in terms of perplexity on large corpora as well as on BLEU score in a downstream machine tra…
Pre-trained language models have achieved huge improvement on many NLP tasks. However, these methods are usually designed for written text, so they do not consider the properties of spoken language. Therefore, this paper aims at generalizing the idea of language model pre-training to lattices generated by recognition systems. We propose a framework that trains neural lattice language models to provide contextualized representations for spoken language understanding tasks. The proposed two-stage pre-training approach reduces the demands of speech data and has better efficiency. Experiments on i…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Meta AI Labs（Meta人工智能实验室）
Interaction between caregivers and children plays a critical role in human language acquisition and development. Given this observation, it is remarkable that explicit interaction plays little to no role in artificial language modeling -- which also targets the acquisition of human language, yet by artificial models. Moreover, an interactive approach to language modeling has the potential to make language models substantially more versatile and to considerably impact downstream applications. Motivated by these considerations, we pioneer the space of interactive language modeling. As a first co…
Speaker intent detection and semantic slot filling are two critical tasks in spoken language understanding (SLU) for dialogue systems. In this paper, we describe a recurrent neural network (RNN) model that jointly performs intent detection, slot filling, and language modeling. The neural network model keeps updating the intent estimation as word in the transcribed utterance arrives and uses it as contextual features in the joint model. Evaluation of the language model and online SLU model is made on the ATIS benchmarking data set. On language modeling task, our joint model achieves 11.8% relat…
Recurrent neural networks have been very successful at predicting sequences of words in tasks such as language modeling. However, all such models are based on the conventional classification framework, where the model is trained against one-hot targets, and each word is represented both as an input and as an output in isolation. This causes inefficiencies in learning both in terms of utilizing all of the information and in terms of the number of parameters needed to train. We introduce a novel theoretical framework that facilitates better learning in language modeling, and show that our framew…
On the Thinking-Language Modeling Gap in Large Language Models
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港 Baptist 大学）；MBZUAI Carnegie Mellon University（MBZUAI 美国卡内基梅隆大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
LSTMs are powerful tools for modeling contextual information, as evidenced by their success at the task of language modeling. However, modeling contexts in very high dimensional space can lead to poor generalizability. We introduce the Pyramidal Recurrent Unit (PRU), which enables learning representations in high dimensional space with more generalization power and fewer parameters. PRUs replace the linear transformation in LSTMs with more sophisticated interactions including pyramidal and grouped linear transformations. This architecture gives strong results on word-level language modeling wh…
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
We demonstrate the complementary natures of neural knowledge graph embedding, fine-grain entity type prediction, and neural language modeling. We show that a language model-inspired knowledge graph embedding approach yields both improved knowledge graph embeddings and fine-grain entity type representations. Our work also shows that jointly modeling both structured knowledge tuples and language improves both.
Pretrained language models are now of widespread use in Natural Language Processing. Despite their success, applying them to Low Resource languages is still a huge challenge. Although Multilingual models hold great promise, applying them to specific low-resource languages e.g. Roman Urdu can be excessive. In this paper, we show how the code-switching property of languages may be used to perform cross-lingual transfer learning from a corresponding high resource language. We also show how this transfer learning technique termed Bilingual Language Modeling can be used to produce better performing…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Lack of text data has been the major issue on code-switching language modeling. In this paper, we introduce multi-task learning based language model which shares syntax representation of languages to leverage linguistic information and tackle the low resource data issue. Our model jointly learns both language modeling and Part-of-Speech tagging on code-switched utterances. In this way, the model is able to identify the location of code-switching points and improves the prediction of next word. Our approach outperforms standard LSTM based language model, with an improvement of 9.7% and 7.4% in …
We present the specification for a modeling language, VoxML, which encodes semantic knowledge of real-world objects represented as three-dimensional models, and of events and attributes related to and enacted over these objects. VoxML is intended to overcome the limitations of existing 3D visual markup languages by allowing for the encoding of a broad range of semantic knowledge that can be exploited by a variety of systems and platforms, leading to multimodal simulations of real-world scenarios using conceptual objects that represent their semantic values.
Multimodal language models attempt to incorporate non-linguistic features for the language modeling task. In this work, we extend a standard recurrent neural network (RNN) language model with features derived from videos. We train our models on data that is two orders-of-magnitude bigger than datasets used in prior work. We perform a thorough exploration of model architectures for combining visual and text features. Our experiments on two corpora (YouCookII and 20bn-something-something-v2) show that the best performing architecture consists of middle fusion of visual and text features, yieldin…
Recently, substantial progress has been made in language modeling by using deep neural networks. However, in practice, large scale neural language models have been shown to be prone to overfitting. In this paper, we present a simple yet highly effective adversarial training mechanism for regularizing neural language models. The idea is to introduce adversarial noise to the output embedding layer while training the models. We show that the optimal adversarial noise yields a simple closed-form solution, thus allowing us to develop a simple and time efficient algorithm. Theoretically, we show tha…
Fixed-vocabulary language models fail to account for one of the most characteristic statistical facts of natural language: the frequent creation and reuse of new word types. Although character-level language models offer a partial solution in that they can create word types not attested in the training corpus, they do not capture the "bursty" distribution of such words. In this paper, we augment a hierarchical LSTM language model that generates sequences of word tokens character by character with a caching mechanism that learns to reuse previously generated words. To validate our model we cons…
Decompilation is the procedure of transforming binary programs into a high-level representation, such as source code, for human analysts to examine. While modern decompilers can reconstruct and recover much information that is discarded during compilation, inferring variable names is still extremely difficult. Inspired by recent advances in natural language processing, we propose a novel solution to infer variable names in decompiled code based on Masked Language Modeling, Byte-Pair Encoding, and neural architectures such as Transformers and BERT. Our solution takes \textit{raw} decompiler out…
Mila/Université de Montréal（米拉/蒙特利尔大学）；Mila/McGill University（米拉/麦吉尔大学）；Element AI；ServiceNow；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Negation is a core construction in natural language. Despite being very successful on many tasks, state-of-the-art pre-trained language models often handle negation incorrectly. To improve language models in this regard, we propose to augment the language modeling objective with an unlikelihood objective that is based on negated generic sentences from a raw text corpus. By training BERT with the resulting combined objective we reduce the mean top~1 error rate to 4% on the negated LAMA dataset. We also see some improvements on the negated NLI benchmarks.
Self-normalizing discriminative models approximate the normalized probability of a class without having to compute the partition function. In the context of language modeling, this property is particularly appealing as it may significantly reduce run-times due to large word vocabularies. In this study, we provide a comprehensive investigation of language modeling self-normalization. First, we theoretically analyze the inherent self-normalization properties of Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) language models. Then, we compare them empirically to softmax-based approaches, which are self-normal…
