Performance analysis of Neural Networks in combination with n-gram language models

Abstract

Neural Network language models (NNLMs) have recently become an important complement to conventional n-gram language models (LMs) in speech-to-text systems. However, little is known about the behavior of NNLMs. The analysis presented in this paper aims to understand which types of events are better modeled by NNLMs as compared to n-gram LMs, in what cases improvements are most substantial and why this is the case. Such an analysis is important to take further benefit from NNLMs used in combination with conventional n-gram models. The analysis is carried out for different types of neural network (feed-forward and recurrent) LMs. The results showing for which type of events NNLMs provide better probability estimates are validated on two setups that are different in their size and the degree of data homogeneity.