Fallback Variable History NNLMs: Efficient NNLMs by precomputation and stochastic training

PLoS One. 2018 Jul 26;13(7):e0200884. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200884. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to reduce the computational cost when using Neural Networks as Language Models, during recognition, in some particular scenarios. It is based on a Neural Network that considers input contexts of different length in order to ease the use of a fallback mechanism together with the precomputation of softmax normalization constants for these inputs. The proposed approach is empirically validated, showing their capability to emulate lower order N-grams with a single Neural Network. A machine translation task shows that the proposed model constitutes a good solution to the normalization cost of the output softmax layer of Neural Networks, for some practical cases, without a significant impact in performance while improving the system speed.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Stochastic Processes

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the Spanish MINECO and FEDER founds under project TIN2017-85854-C4-2-R (to MJCB). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.