Strategies for Training Large Vocabulary Neural Language Models

Welin Chen; David Grangier; Michael Auli

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arXiv · 1512.04906

Strategies for Training Large Vocabulary Neural Language Models

Welin Chen·David Grangier·Michael Auli

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Abstract

Training neural network language models over large vocabularies is still computationally very costly compared to count-based models such as Kneser-Ney. At the same time, neural language models are gaining popularity for many applications such as speech recognition and machine translation whose success depends on scalability. We present a systematic comparison of strategies to represent and train large vocabularies, including softmax, hierarchical softmax, target sampling, noise contrastive estimation and self normalization. We further extend self normalization to be a proper estimator of likelihood and introduce an efficient variant of softmax. We evaluate each method on three popular benchmarks, examining performance on rare words, the speed/accuracy trade-off and complementarity to Kneser-Ney.

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Welin Chen, David Grangier, Michael Auli. 2015-12-15. Strategies for Training Large Vocabulary Neural Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04906

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