Traditional Language Models

Traditional language models form the foundation of modern NLP and are crucial for understanding the evolution towards transformer-based architectures. This guide provides an overview of classical approaches to language modeling.

N-gram Language Models and Smoothing Techniques

  • N-gram Models
    • Probability calculations
    • Maximum Likelihood Estimation
    • Context window approaches
    • Markov assumption
  • Smoothing Methods
    • Laplace (Add-1) smoothing
    • Add-k smoothing
    • Good-Turing smoothing
    • Kneser-Ney smoothing
    • Backoff and interpolation
  • Evaluation Metrics
    • Perplexity
    • Cross-entropy
    • Out-of-vocabulary handling

Feedforward Neural Language Models

  • Architecture Overview
    • Input representation
    • Projection layer
    • Hidden layers
    • Output softmax
    • Fixed context window
  • Training Process
    • Word embeddings
    • Continuous space language models
    • Handling vocabulary size
    • Mini-batch training
  • Limitations
    • Fixed context size
    • Lack of parameter sharing
    • Scalability issues

Recurrent Neural Network Language Models

  • Basic RNN Architecture
    • Hidden state representation
    • Time-step processing
    • Backpropagation through time (BPTT)
    • Vanishing/exploding gradients

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks

  • LSTM Components
    • Input gate
    • Forget gate
    • Output gate
    • Cell state
    • Hidden state

Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs)

  • GRU Architecture
    • Reset gate
    • Update gate
    • Candidate activation
    • Final activation

Bidirectional and Multilayer RNNs

  • Architecture Types
    • Bidirectional processing
    • Deep RNN design
    • Residual connections
    • Layer normalization

Learning Resources

Foundational Reading

Neural Language Models

Advanced Architectures

Practical Tutorials


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