A Billion Words Because todays language modeling standard should be higher

Posted by Dave Orr, Product Manager, and Ciprian Chelba, Research Scientist

Language is chock full of ambiguity, and it can turn up in surprising places. Many words are hard to tell apart without context: most Americans pronounce “ladder” and “latter” identically, for instance. Keyboard inputs on mobile devices have a similar problem, especially for IME keyboards. For example, the input patterns for “Yankees” and “takes” look very similar:

Photo credit: Kurt Partridge

But in this context -- the previous two words, “New York” -- “Yankees” is much more likely.

One key way computers use context is with language models. These are used for predictive keyboards, but also speech recognition, machine translation, spelling correction, query suggestions, and so on. Often those are specialized: word order for queries versus web pages can be very different. Either way, having an accurate language model with wide coverage drives the quality of all these applications.

Due to interactions between components, one thing that can be tricky when evaluating the quality of such complex systems is error attribution. Good engineering practice is to evaluate the quality of each module separately, including the language model. We believe that the field could benefit from a large, standard set with benchmarks for easy comparison and experiments with new modeling techniques.

To that end, we are releasing scripts that convert a set of public data into a language model consisting of over a billion words, with standardized training and test splits, described in an arXiv paper. Along with the scripts, we’re releasing the processed data in one convenient location, along with the training and test data. This will make it much easier for the research community to quickly reproduce results, and we hope will speed up progress on these tasks.

The benchmark scripts and data are freely available, and can be found here: http://www.statmt.org/lm-benchmark/

The field needs a new and better standard benchmark. Currently, researchers report from a set of their choice, and results are very hard to reproduce because of a lack of a standard in preprocessing. We hope that this will solve both those problems, and become the standard benchmark for language modeling experiments. As more researchers use the new benchmark, comparisons will be easier and more accurate, and progress will be faster.

For all the researchers out there, try out this model, run your experiments, and let us know how it goes -- or publish, and we’ll enjoy finding your results at conferences and in journals.

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Application Of Systems Modeling Software In Solar Energy Harnessing

By Alyce Powell

Systems modeling software is an application that has the ability to resize a region for a particular task to be made on it. For such an application to function efficiently and effectively, some of the most important factors that it should focus and expound accordingly are the budgetary allocated for energy and the very factors that may affect the functionality of this kind of system that are essential. It finds use both in building and energy generation.

To size the structure of the solar panel required, a model has to be used. Before doing the model part, a lot of data is collected regarding the region of interest. The companies awarded this tenders have been found to dig deep in searching for information up to referring to information kept by the NASA body.

Obviously the amount of this radiations have to differ from place to place just as shown when one moves from the highland region towards a low lying area such as a lake. It is expected that the low lying location which happens to be the lake to have the highest levels of solar energies. This should show that the solar panel structure should not be placed somewhere far from the modeled region.

Designer models for solar tapping have a lot of factors to look into. The duration of service rendered by the application for example need a close scrutiny. Other variables arise from the very batteries to be used. The duration of charging state to that of discharge state in unquestionable and has to be focused on. Temperature though environmental has an effect as well.

Real structures need maintenance and repair because they wear out with time. The designed structures must always depict the same. A used battery cannot at any given time perform as efficiently as a new one. This puts more work on the designers to find solutions to counter this unavoidable short coming. This issue has to be addressed during the design stage otherwise the same situation will be transferred to the main structure.

A structure must be molded to function using the amount of solar energy it was programmed to work when installing it in that specific locality. It should be re-sized such that it can function even in the extreme cases where the sun might be covered by the clouds. This assures the consumers of maximum performance independent of the prevailing climatic conditions.

A solar harnessing structure that reproduces the same power even in adverse weather conditions is lucrative. The battery should discharge during this period but it should be checked so that it does not discharge for long until it destroys the battery lest one incurs the expensive cost of getting another.

It is therefore important to understand and appreciate the big changes brought about by the systems modeling software in all its numerous areas of application. Designing and modeling using this amazing software should be encouraged.

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