Learning to Create and Reuse Words in Open-Vocabulary Neural Language Modeling

Kazuya Kawakami, Chris Dyer, Phil Blunsom
2017 Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)  
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
more » ... h a caching mechanism that learns to reuse previously generated words. To validate our model we construct a new open-vocabulary language modeling corpus (the Multilingual Wikipedia Corpus; MWC) from comparable Wikipedia articles in 7 typologically diverse languages and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model across this range of languages.
doi:10.18653/v1/p17-1137 dblp:conf/acl/KawakamiDB17 fatcat:afv2q2boufeonji3st6ybn5ihy