PLoS ONE (Jan 2018)

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

  • Francisco J Zamora-Martínez,
  • Salvador España-Boquera,
  • Maria Jose Castro-Bleda,
  • Adrian Palacios-Corella

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200884
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 7
p. e0200884

Abstract

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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.