On-line algorithms for combining language models

  • Authors:
  • A. Kalai;S. Chen;A. Blum;R. Rosenfeld

  • Affiliations:
  • Sch. of Comput. Sci., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICASSP '99 Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 02
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Multiple language models are combined for many tasks in language modeling, such as domain and topic adaptation. In this work, we compare on-line algorithms from machine learning to existing algorithms for combining language models. On-line algorithms developed for this problem have parameters that are updated dynamically to adapt to a data set during evaluation. On-line analysis provides guarantees that these algorithms will perform nearly as well as the best model chosen in hindsight from a large class of models, e.g., the set of all static mixtures. We describe several on-line algorithms and present results comparing these techniques with existing language modeling combination methods on the task of domain adaptation. We demonstrate that, in some situations, on-line techniques can significantly outperform static mixtures (by over 10% in terms of perplexity) and are especially effective when the nature of the test data is unknown or changes over time.