Revisiting Simple Neural Probabilistic Language Models

NAACL 2021  ·  Simeng Sun, Mohit Iyyer ·

Recent progress in language modeling has been driven not only by advances in neural architectures, but also through hardware and optimization improvements. In this paper, we revisit the neural probabilistic language model (NPLM) of~\citet{Bengio2003ANP}, which simply concatenates word embeddings within a fixed window and passes the result through a feed-forward network to predict the next word. When scaled up to modern hardware, this model (despite its many limitations) performs much better than expected on word-level language model benchmarks. Our analysis reveals that the NPLM achieves lower perplexity than a baseline Transformer with short input contexts but struggles to handle long-term dependencies. Inspired by this result, we modify the Transformer by replacing its first self-attention layer with the NPLM's local concatenation layer, which results in small but consistent perplexity decreases across three word-level language modeling datasets.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Benchmark
Language Modelling WikiText-103 Transformer-N Validation perplexity 24.1 # 25
Test perplexity 25.2 # 59
Number of params 148M # 31

Methods