@inproceedings{herold-etal-2018-improving,
    title = "Improving Neural Language Models with Weight Norm Initialization and Regularization",
    author = "Herold, Christian  and
      Gao, Yingbo  and
      Ney, Hermann",
    editor = "Bojar, Ond{\v{r}}ej  and
      Chatterjee, Rajen  and
      Federmann, Christian  and
      Fishel, Mark  and
      Graham, Yvette  and
      Haddow, Barry  and
      Huck, Matthias  and
      Yepes, Antonio Jimeno  and
      Koehn, Philipp  and
      Monz, Christof  and
      Negri, Matteo  and
      N{\'e}v{\'e}ol, Aur{\'e}lie  and
      Neves, Mariana  and
      Post, Matt  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Turchi, Marco  and
      Verspoor, Karin",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Research Papers",
    month = oct,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Brussels, Belgium",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W18-6310/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W18-6310",
    pages = "93--100",
    abstract = "Embedding and projection matrices are commonly used in neural language models (NLM) as well as in other sequence processing networks that operate on large vocabularies. We examine such matrices in fine-tuned language models and observe that a NLM learns word vectors whose norms are related to the word frequencies. We show that by initializing the weight norms with scaled log word counts, together with other techniques, lower perplexities can be obtained in early epochs of training. We also introduce a weight norm regularization loss term, whose hyperparameters are tuned via a grid search. With this method, we are able to significantly improve perplexities on two word-level language modeling tasks (without dynamic evaluation): from 54.44 to 53.16 on Penn Treebank (PTB) and from 61.45 to 60.13 on WikiText-2 (WT2)."
}