Character-Word LSTM Language Models Lyan Verwimp Joris Pelemans Hugo Van hamme Patrick Wambacq ESAT – PSI, KU Leuven Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium
[email protected] Abstract A first drawback is the fact that the parameters for infrequent words are typically less accurate because We present a Character-Word Long Short- the network requires a lot of training examples to Term Memory Language Model which optimize the parameters. The second and most both reduces the perplexity with respect important drawback addressed is the fact that the to a baseline word-level language model model does not make use of the internal structure and reduces the number of parameters of the words, given that they are encoded as one-hot of the model. Character information can vectors. For example, ‘felicity’ (great happiness) is reveal structural (dis)similarities between a relatively infrequent word (its frequency is much words and can even be used when a word lower compared to the frequency of ‘happiness’ is out-of-vocabulary, thus improving the according to Google Ngram Viewer (Michel et al., modeling of infrequent and unknown words. 2011)) and will probably be an out-of-vocabulary By concatenating word and character (OOV) word in many applications, but since there embeddings, we achieve up to 2.77% are many nouns also ending on ‘ity’ (ability, com- relative improvement on English compared plexity, creativity . ), knowledge of the surface to a baseline model with a similar amount of form of the word will help in determining that ‘felic- parameters and 4.57% on Dutch. Moreover, ity’ is a noun.