INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

Hierarchical Pitman-Yor and Dirichlet Process for Language Model

Jen-Tzung Chien, Ying-Lan Chang

National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

This paper presents a nonparametric interpretation for modern language model based on the hierarchical Pitman-Yor and Dirichlet (HPYD) process. We propose the HPYD language model (HPYD-LM) which flexibly conducts backoff smoothing and topic clustering through Bayesian nonparametric learning. The nonparametric priors of backoff n-grams and latent topics are tightly coupled in a compound process. A hybrid probability measure is drawn to build the smoothed topic-based LM. The model structure is automatically determined from training data. A new Chinese restaurant scenario is proposed to implement HPYD-LM via Gibbs sampling. This process reflects the power-law property and extracts the semantic topics from natural language. The superiority of HPYD-LM to the related LMs is demonstrated by the experiments on different corpora in terms of perplexity and word error rate.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Chien, Jen-Tzung / Chang, Ying-Lan (2013): "Hierarchical pitman-yor and dirichlet process for language model", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 2212-2216.