Augmenting Words with Linguistic Information for N-Gram Language Models

The main goal of the present work is to explore the use of rich lexical information in language modelling. We reformulated the task of a language model from predicting the next word given its history to predicting simultaneously both the word and a tag encoding various types of lexical information. Using part-of-speech tags and syntactic/semantic feature tags obtained with a set of NLP tools developed at Microsoft Research, we obtained a reduction in perplexity compared to the baseline phrase trigram model in a set of preliminary tests performed on part of the WSJ corpus.