Related papers: Precise n-gram Probabilities from Stochastic Conte…
We consider the problem of estimating a rank-one matrix in Gaussian noise under a probabilistic model for the left and right factors of the matrix. The probabilistic model can impose constraints on the factors including sparsity and…
What have language models (LMs) learned about grammar? This question remains hotly debated, with major ramifications for linguistic theory. However, since probability and grammaticality are distinct notions in linguistics, it is not obvious…
A statistical model for segmentation and word discovery in continuous speech is presented. An incremental unsupervised learning algorithm to infer word boundaries based on this model is described. Results of empirical tests showing that the…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
The following learning problem arises naturally in various applications: Given a finite sample from a categorical or count time series, can we learn a function of the sample that (nearly) maximizes the probability of correctly guessing the…
We present an algorithm for synthesizing a context-free grammar encoding the language of valid program inputs from a set of input examples and blackbox access to the program. Our algorithm addresses shortcomings of existing grammar…
It has recently been shown that many of the existing quasi-Newton algorithms can be formulated as learning algorithms, capable of learning local models of the cost functions. Importantly, this understanding allows us to safely start…
In a recent paper (M. Barash, A. Okhotin, "Defining contexts in context-free grammars", LATA 2012), the authors introduced an extension of the context-free grammars equipped with an operator for referring to the left context of the…
Constituency parsing is a fundamental and important task for natural language understanding, where a good representation of contextual information can help this task. N-grams, which is a conventional type of feature for contextual…
To model combinatorial decision problems involving uncertainty and probability, we introduce stochastic constraint programming. Stochastic constraint programs contain both decision variables (which we can set) and stochastic variables…
Traditional natural language parsers are based on rewrite rule systems developed in an arduous, time-consuming manner by grammarians. A majority of the grammarian's efforts are devoted to the disambiguation process, first hypothesizing…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…
We describe an approach to robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of unrestricted naturally-occurring (English) input. The technique involves parsing sequences of part-of-speech and punctuation labels using a unification-based grammar…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
In this paper, we consider static parameter estimation for a class of continuous-time state-space models. Our goal is to obtain an unbiased estimate of the gradient of the log-likelihood (score function), which is an estimate that is…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the three stochastic approximation proximal gradient algorithms proposed in our companion paper [49] to set regularization parameters by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. We prove…
Probabilistic programs encode stochastic models as ordinary-looking programs with primitives for sampling numbers from predefined distributions and conditioning. Their applications include, among many others, machine learning and modeling…
Usually, probabilistic automata and probabilistic grammars have crisp symbols as inputs, which can be viewed as the formal models of computing with values. In this paper, we first introduce probabilistic automata and probabilistic grammars…
This thesis investigates how the sub-structure of words can be accounted for in probabilistic models of language. Such models play an important role in natural language processing tasks such as translation or speech recognition, but often…
This manuscript proposes a probabilistic framework for algorithms that iteratively solve unconstrained linear problems $Bx = b$ with positive definite $B$ for $x$. The goal is to replace the point estimates returned by existing methods with…