Improving cross-domain n-gram language modelling with skipgrams

Louis Onrust, Antal van den Bosch, Hugo Van hamme

Abstract: In this paper we improve over the hierarchical Pitman-Yor processes language model in a cross-domain setting by adding skipgrams as features. We find that adding skipgram features reduces the perplexity. This reduction is substantial when models are trained on a generic corpus and tested on domain-specific corpora. We also find that within-domain testing and cross-domain testing require different backoff strategies. We observe a 30-40% reduction in perplexity in a cross-domain language modelling task, and up to 6% reduction in a within-domain experiment, for both English and Flemish-Dutch.