Tying Word Vectors and Word Classifiers: A Loss Framework for Language Modeling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework for language modeling that ties word vectors and classifiers, reducing parameters and improving performance on standard benchmarks.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel loss framework that links input embeddings and output classifiers, enhancing learning efficiency and model performance.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on Penn Treebank

Reduces the number of trainable parameters

Provides a unified theoretical perspective on language modeling

Abstract

Recurrent neural networks have been very successful at predicting sequences of words in tasks such as language modeling. However, all such models are based on the conventional classification framework, where the model is trained against one-hot targets, and each word is represented both as an input and as an output in isolation. This causes inefficiencies in learning both in terms of utilizing all of the information and in terms of the number of parameters needed to train. We introduce a novel theoretical framework that facilitates better learning in language modeling, and show that our framework leads to tying together the input embedding and the output projection matrices, greatly reducing the number of trainable variables. Our framework leads to state of the art performance on the Penn Treebank with a variety of network models.