Exploiting Syntactic Structure for Language Modeling

Abstract

Copyright c©1998 by The Association for Computational Linguistics The paper presents a language model that devel-ops syntactic structure and uses it to extract mean-ingful information from the word history, thus en-abling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint sequence of words–binary-parse-structure with headword an-notation and operates in a left-to-right manner — therefore usable for automatic speech recognition. The model, its probabilistic parameterization, and a set of experiments meant to evaluate its predictive power are presented; an improvement over standard trigram modeling is achieved. 1