Skip to main content

Combining Topic Specific Language Models

  • Conference paper
Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6836))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

In this paper we investigate whether a combination of topic specific language models can outperform a general purpose language model, using a trigram model as our baseline model. We show that in the ideal case — in which it is known beforehand which model to use — specific models perform considerably better than the baseline model. We test two methods that combine specific models and show that these combinations outperform the general purpose model, in particular if the data is diverse in terms of topics and vocabulary. Inspired by these findings, we propose to combine a decision tree and a set of dynamic Bayesian networks into a new model. The new model uses context information to dynamically select an appropriate specific model.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Chelba, C., Jelinek, F.: Exploiting syntactic structure for language modeling. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, vol. 1, pp. 225–231. ACL, Stroudsburg (1998)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Rosenfeld, R.: A maximum entropy approach to adaptive statistical language modelling. Computer Speech and Language 10, 187–228 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Schwenk, H.: Efficient training of large neural networks for language modeling. In: Proceedings IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, 2004, vol. 4, pp. 3059–3064 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Wiggers, P., Rothkrantz, L.: Combining topic information and structure information in a dynamic language model. In: Matoušek, V., Mautner, P. (eds.) TSD 2009. LNCS, vol. 5729, pp. 218–225. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Shi, Y., Wiggers, P., Jonker, C.: Language modelling with dynamic bayesian networks using conversation types and part of speech information. In: The 22nd Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence, BNAIC (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Clarkson, P., Robinson, A.J.: Language model adaptation using mixtures and an exponentially decaying cache. In: Proc. ICASSP 1997, Munich, Germany, pp. 799–802 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Kneser, R., Steinbiss, V.: On the dynamic adaptation of stochastic language models. In: Proceedings of ICASSP 1993, Minnapolis(USA), vol. II, pp. 586–589 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Iyer, R., Ostendorf, M., Rohlicek, J.R.: Language modeling with sentence-level mixtures. In: HLT 1994: Proceedings of the Workshop on Human Language Technology, pp. 82–87. Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Bahl, L.R., Brown, P.F., de Souza, P.V., Mercer, R.L.: A tree-based statistical language model for natural language speech recognition. IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 37, 1001–1008 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Xu, P., Jelinek, F.: Random forests in language modeling. In: Proceedings of EMNLP, pp. 325–332 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hoekstra, H., Moortgat, M., Schuurman, I., van der Wouden, T.: Syntactic annotation for the spoken dutch corpus project (cgn). In: Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2000, pp. 73–87 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Oostdijk, N., Goedertier, W., Eynde, F.V., Boves, L., Pierre Martens, J., Moortgat, M., Baayen, H.: Experiences from the spoken dutch corpus project. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, pp. 340–347 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Pearl, J.: Probabilistic reasoning in intelligent systems: networks of plausible inference. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (1988)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  14. Dean, T., Kanazawa, K.: A model for reasoning about persistence and causation. Computational Intelligence 5, 142–150 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Murphy, K.P.: Dynamic Bayesian Networks: Representation, Inference and Learning. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Baeza-Yates, R., Ribeiro-Neto, B.: Modern Information Retrieval. Addison Wesley, Reading (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Dempster, A.P., Laird, N.M., Rubin, D.B.: Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the em algorithm. Journal of the royal statistical society, series B 39, 1–38 (1977)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Shi, Y., Wiggers, P., Jonker, C.M. (2011). Combining Topic Specific Language Models. In: Habernal, I., Matoušek, V. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6836. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23538-2_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23538-2_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23537-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23538-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics