An Empirical Study on Language Model Adaptation Using a Metric of Domain Similarity

Abstract. This paper presents an empirical study on four techniques of language model adaptation, including a maximum a posteriori (MAP) method and three discriminative training models, in the application of Japanese Kana-Kanji conversion. We compare the performance of these methods from various angles by adapting the baseline model to four adaptation domains. In particular, we attempt to interpret the results given in terms of the character error rate (CER) by correlating them with the characteristics of the adaptation domain measured using the information-theoretic notion of cross entropy. We show that such a metric correlates well with the CER performance of the adaptation methods, and also show that the discriminative methods are not only superior to a MAP-based method in terms of achieving larger CER reduction, but are also more robust against the similarity of background and adaptation domains.

Predicting the Effectiveness of Self-Training: Application to Sentiment Classification

The goal of this paper is to investigate the connection between the performance gain that can be obtained by selftraining and the similarity between the corpora used in this approach. Self-training is a semi-supervised technique designed to increase the performance of machine learning algorithms by automatically classifying instances of a task and adding these as additional training material to the same classifier. In the context of language processing tasks, this training material is mostly an (annotated) corpus. Unfortunately self-training does not always lead to a performance increase and whether it will is largely unpredictable. We show that the similarity between corpora can be used to identify those setups for which self-training can be beneficial. We consider this research as a step in the process of developing a classifier that is able to adapt itself to each new test corpus that it is presented with