This course serves as an introduction to various advanced topics in formal language theory. The primary focus of the course is on weighted formalisms, which can easily be applied in machine learning. Topics include finite-state machines as well as the algorithms that are commonly used for their manipulation. We will also cover weighted context-free grammars, weighted tree automata, and weighted mildly context-sensitive formalisms.
This course serves as an introduction to various advanced topics in formal language theory. The primary focus of the course is on weighted formalisms, which can easily be applied in machine learning. Topics include finite-state machines as well as the algorithms that are commonly used for their manipulation. We will also cover weighted context-free grammars, weighted tree automata, and weighted mildly context-sensitive formalisms.
The *Information Theory in Linguistics* course focuses on the application of information-theoretic methods to natural language processing, emphasizing interdisciplinary connections with the field of linguistics.
The *Information Theory in Linguistics* course focuses on the application of information-theoretic methods to natural language processing, emphasizing interdisciplinary connections with the field of linguistics.
This tutorial is a comprehensive introduction to neural network language models, focusing on those based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and Transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017), and their relationship to formal language theory. We teach how tools from weighted formal language theory can be useful for understanding the inner workings of and predicting the generalization of modern neural architectures. Over the course of five days, we will explore the theoretical properties of RNNs and their representational capacity in relation to different levels of the weighted Chomsky hierarchy, starting with finite-state automata and the special case of bounded-depth hierarchical languages, and then move on to more complex formalisms such as context-free languages and Turing machines. We will prove multiple theoretical properties of RNNs, including the fact that simple RNNs with infinite precision arithmetic and unbounded computation time can emulate a Turing machine and show how RNNs can optimally represent finite-state automata. We will also discuss recent results in the study of Transformer-based language models from the perspective of formal language theory. Finally, we will discuss the implications of these results for the analysis and practical deployment of language models.
An increasingly large percentage of natural language processing (NLP) tasks center around the generation of text from probabilistic language models. Despite this trend, techniques for improving or specifying preferences in these generated texts rely mostly on intuition-based heuristics. Further, there lacks a unified presentation of their motivations, practical implementation, successes and pitfalls. Practitioners must, therefore, choose somewhat blindly between generation algorithms—like top-p sampling or beam search—which can lead to wildly different results. At the same time, language generation research continues to criticize and improve the standard toolboxes, further adding entropy to the state of the field. In this tutorial, we will provide a centralized and cohesive discussion of critical considerations when choosing how to generate from a language model. We will cover a wide range of empirically-observed problems (like degradation, hallucination, repetition) and their corresponding proposed algorithmic solutions from recent research (like top-p sampling and its successors). We will then discuss a subset of these algorithms under a unified light; most stochastic generation strategies can be framed as locally adapting the probabilities of a model to avoid failure cases. Finally, we will then cover methods in controlled generation, that go beyond just ensuring coherence to ensure text exhibits specific desired properties. We aim for NLP practitioners and researchers to leave our tutorial with a unified framework which they can use to evaluate and contribute to the latest research in language generation.
Large language models have become one of the most commonly deployed NLP inventions. In the past half-decade, their integration into core natural language processing tools has dramatically increased the performance of such tools, and they have entered the public discourse surrounding artificial intelligence. In this course, we start with the probabilistic foundations of language models, i.e., covering what constitutes a language model from a formal, theoretical perspective. We then discuss how to construct and curate training corpora, and introduce many of the neural-network architectures often used to instantiate language models at scale. The course covers aspects of systems programming, discussion of privacy and harms, as well as applications of language models in NLP and beyond.
This course presents topics in natural language processing with an emphasis on modern techniques, primarily focusing on statistical and deep learning approaches. The course provides an overview of the primary areas of research in language processing as well as a detailed exploration of the models and techniques used both in research and in commercial natural language systems.
This course presents topics in natural language processing with an emphasis on modern techniques, primarily focusing on statistical and deep learning approaches. The course provides an overview of the primary areas of research in language processing as well as a detailed exploration of the models and techniques used both in research and in commercial natural language systems.