Large-scale syntactic language modeling with treelets

  • Authors:
  • Adam Pauls;Dan Klein

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACL '12 Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Long Papers - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We propose a simple generative, syntactic language model that conditions on overlapping windows of tree context (or treelets) in the same way that n-gram language models condition on overlapping windows of linear context. We estimate the parameters of our model by collecting counts from automatically parsed text using standard n-gram language model estimation techniques, allowing us to train a model on over one billion tokens of data using a single machine in a matter of hours. We evaluate on perplexity and a range of grammaticality tasks, and find that we perform as well or better than n-gram models and other generative baselines. Our model even competes with state-of-the-art discriminative models hand-designed for the grammaticality tasks, despite training on positive data alone. We also show fluency improvements in a preliminary machine translation experiment.