Towards Zero-shot Language Modeling

Edoardo Maria Ponti, Ivan Vulić, Ryan Cotterell, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen


Abstract
Can we construct a neural language model which is inductively biased towards learning human language? Motivated by this question, we aim at constructing an informative prior for held-out languages on the task of character-level, open-vocabulary language modelling. We obtain this prior as the posterior over network weights conditioned on the data from a sample of training languages, which is approximated through Laplace’s method. Based on a large and diverse sample of languages, the use of our prior outperforms baseline models with an uninformative prior in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, showing that the prior is imbued with universal linguistic knowledge. Moreover, we harness broad language-specific information available for most languages of the world, i.e., features from typological databases, as distant supervision for held-out languages. We explore several language modelling conditioning techniques, including concatenation and meta-networks for parameter generation. They appear beneficial in the few-shot setting, but ineffective in the zero-shot setting. Since the paucity of even plain digital text affects the majority of the world’s languages, we hope that these insights will broaden the scope of applications for language technology.
Anthology ID:
D19-1288
Original:
D19-1288v1
Version 2:
D19-1288v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2900–2910
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1288
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1288
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Edoardo Maria Ponti, Ivan Vulić, Ryan Cotterell, Roi Reichart, and Anna Korhonen. 2019. Towards Zero-shot Language Modeling. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2900–2910, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Zero-shot Language Modeling (Ponti et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1288.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1288.Attachment.pdf