Structured Penalties for Log-Linear Language Models

Abstract

Language models can be formalized as loglinear regression models where the input features represent previously observed contexts up to a certain length m. The complexity of existing algorithms to learn the parameters by maximum likelihood scale linearly in nd, where n is the length of the training corpus and d is the number of observed features. We present a model that grows logarithmically in d, making it possible to efficiently leverage longer contexts. We account for the sequential structure of natural language using treestructured penalized objectives to avoid overfitting and achieve better generalization.