@inproceedings{goldberger-melamud-2018-self,
    title = "Self-Normalization Properties of Language Modeling",
    author = "Goldberger, Jacob  and
      Melamud, Oren",
    editor = "Bender, Emily M.  and
      Derczynski, Leon  and
      Isabelle, Pierre",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = aug,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/C18-1065/",
    pages = "764--773",
    abstract = "Self-normalizing discriminative models approximate the normalized probability of a class without having to compute the partition function. In the context of language modeling, this property is particularly appealing as it may significantly reduce run-times due to large word vocabularies. In this study, we provide a comprehensive investigation of language modeling self-normalization. First, we theoretically analyze the inherent self-normalization properties of Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) language models. Then, we compare them empirically to softmax-based approaches, which are self-normalized using explicit regularization, and suggest a hybrid model with compelling properties. Finally, we uncover a surprising negative correlation between self-normalization and perplexity across the board, as well as some regularity in the observed errors, which may potentially be used for improving self-normalization algorithms in the future."
}