A Fast Variational Approach for Learning Markov Random Field Language Models

Abstract

Language modelling is a fundamental building block of natural language processing. However, in practice the size of the vocabulary limits the distributions applicable for this task: specifically, one has to either resort to local optimization methods, such as those used in neural language models, or work with heavily constrained distributions. In this work, we take a step towards overcoming these difficulties. We present a method for global-likelihood optimization of a Markov random field language model exploiting long-range contexts in time independent of the corpus size. We take a variational approach to optimizing the likelihood and exploit underlying symmetries to greatly simplify learning. We demonstrate the efficiency of this method both for language modelling and for part-of-speech tagging.

Cite

Text

Jernite et al. "A Fast Variational Approach for Learning Markov Random Field Language Models." International Conference on Machine Learning, 2015.

Markdown

[Jernite et al. "A Fast Variational Approach for Learning Markov Random Field Language Models." International Conference on Machine Learning, 2015.](https://mlanthology.org/icml/2015/jernite2015icml-fast/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{jernite2015icml-fast,
  title     = {{A Fast Variational Approach for Learning Markov Random Field Language Models}},
  author    = {Jernite, Yacine and Rush, Alexander and Sontag, David},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {2015},
  pages     = {2209-2217},
  volume    = {37},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/icml/2015/jernite2015icml-fast/}
}