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Exploring the Limits of Language Modeling (arxiv.org)
3 points by tim_sw on Feb 11, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They scaled up word-prediction networks to handle huge vocabularies and long stretches of text, testing many variants on a giant collection of sentences. Their best single model cut prediction error (perplexity) from 51.3 to 30.0 while using 20 times fewer parameters.

Abstract

In this work we explore recent advances in Recurrent Neural Networks for large scale Language Modeling, a task central to language understanding. We extend current models to deal with two key challenges present in this task: corpora and vocabulary sizes, and complex, long term structure of language. We perform an exhaustive study on techniques such as character Convolutional Neural Networks or Long-Short Term Memory, on the One Billion Word Benchmark. Our best single model significantly improves state-of-the-art perplexity from 51.3 down to 30.0 (whilst reducing the number of parameters by a factor of 20), while an ensemble of models sets a new record by improving perplexity from 41.0 down to 23.7. We also release these models for the NLP and ML community to study and improve upon.

Rafal Jozefowicz, Oriol Vinyals, Mike Schuster, Noam Shazeer, Yonghui Wu
arXiv:1602.02410 · cs.CL · submitted Feb 7, 2016 · updated Feb 11, 2016
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