Conference Proceedings

Topically Driven Neural Language Model

Jey Han Lau, Timothy Baldwin, Trevor Cohn

Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2017, Vancouver, Canada, July 30 - August 4, Volume 1: Long Papers | ACL Anthology | Published : 2017

Abstract

Language models are typically applied at the sentence level, without access to the broader document context. We present a neural language model that incorporates document context in the form of a topic model-like architecture, thus providing a succinct representation of the broader document context outside of the current sentence. Experiments over a range of datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms a pure sentence-based model in terms of language model perplexity, and leads to topics that are potentially more coherent than those produced by a standard LDA topic model. Our model also has the ability to generate related sentences for a topic, providing another way to interpret topics.

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and valuable suggestions. This work was funded in part by the Australian Research Council.