# Classical \(k\)-gram Language Models in R

#### Valerio Gherardi

    library(kgrams)

## Introduction

`kgrams` provides R users with a set of tools for training, tuning and exploring \(k\)-gram language models1. It gives support for a number of common Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks: from the basic ones, such as extracting (tokenizing) \(k\)-grams from a text and predicting sentence or continuation probabilities, to more advanced ones such as computing language model perplexities2 and sampling sentences according the language model’s probability distribution. Furthermore, it supports many classical \(k\)-gram smoothing methods, including the well-known modified Kneser-Ney algorithm, first described in (Chen and Goodman 1999), and widely considered the best performing smoothing technique for \(k\)-gram models.

\(k\)-gram language models are notoriously demanding from the space point of view, and many of the toolkits available for \(k\)-gram based NLP employ various techniques and data structures to achieve the data compression required by the large scales of industry (and, sometimes, academic) applications (see (Pibiri and Venturini 2019) for a recent review). On the other hand, at such large scales, neural language models are often the most economic and best performing choice, and this is likely to become more and more so in the future. In developing `kgrams`, I made no special attempt at data compression, and \(k\)-grams and count estimates are stored in plain C++ STL hash-tables, which can grow rapidly large as the size of corpora and dictionaries increases.

On the other hand, most focus is put on providing a fast, time efficient implementation, with intuitive interfaces for text processing and for model evaluation, and a reasonably large choice of pre-implemented smoothing algorithms, making `kgrams` suitable for small- and medium-scale language model experiments, for rapidly building baseline models, and for pedagogical purposes.

In my point of view, the interest in \(k\)-gram language models is mainly pedagogical, as they provide very simple algorithms (together with all their limitations) for learning a natural language’s sentence probability distribution. Nonetheless, and for the same reasons, \(k\)-gram models can also provide a useful, quick baseline for model building with more complex algorithms. An R implementation of classical \(k\)-gram smoothing techniques is lacking at the time of writing, and the goal of `kgrams` is to fill this gap.

In the following Sections, I illustrate the prototypical workflow for building a \(k\)-gram language model with `kgrams`, show how to compute probabilities and perplexities, and (for the sake of fun!) generate random text at different temperatures.

## Building a \(k\)-gram language model

This section illustrates the typical workflow for building a \(k\)-gram language model with `kgrams`. In summary, this involves the following main steps:

1. Load the training corpus, i.e. the text from which \(k\)-gram frequencies are estimated.
2. Preprocess the corpus and tokenize sentences.
3. Store \(k\)-gram frequency counts from the preprocessed training corpus.
4. Build the final language model, by initializing its parameters and computing auxiliary counts possibly required by the smoothing technique employed.

We illustrate all these steps in the following.

### Step 1: Loading the training corpus

`kgrams` offers two options for reading the text corpora used in its computations, which are basically in-memory and out-of-memory solutions:

- in-memory. The corpus is simply loaded in the R session as a `character` vector.
- out-of-memory. The text is read in batches of fixed size from a `connection`. This solution includes, for instance, reading text from a file, from an URL, or from the standard input.

The out-of-memory solution can be useful for training over large corpora without the need of storing the entire text into the RAM.

In this vignette, for illustration, we will train a language model on an online text source. We will use William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” (text of the entire play) as training corpus, which is freely available on shakespeare.mit.edu:

    # Create an URL connection to Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing"
    txt_con <- url("http://shakespeare.mit.edu/much_ado/full.html")

### Step 2: preprocessing and tokenizing sentences

One can (and usually should) apply some transformations to the raw training corpus before feeding it as input to the \(k\)-gram counting algorithm. In particular, the algorithm considers as a sentence each entry of its pre-processed input, and pads each sentence with Begin-Of-Sentence (BOS) and End-Of-Sentence (EOS) tokens. It considers as a word any substring of a sentence delimited by (one or more) space characters.

For the moment, we only need to define the functions used for preprocessing and sentence tokenization. We will use the following functions, which leverage on the basic utilities `kgrams::preprocess()` and `kgrams::tknz_sent()`, and perform some additional steps, since we will be reading raw HTML lines from the URL connection created above.

    .preprocess <- function(x) {
            # Remove speaker name and locations (boldfaced in original html)
            x <- gsub("<b>[A-z]+</b>", "", x)
            # Remove other html tags
            x <- gsub("<[^>]+>||<[^>]+$||^[^>]+>$", "", x)
            # Apply standard preprocessing including lower-case
            x <- kgrams::preprocess(x)
            # Collapse to a single string to avoid splitting into more sentences at the end of lines
            x <- paste(x, collapse = " ")
            return(x)
    }

    .tknz_sent <- function(x) {
            # Tokenize sentences
            x <- kgrams::tknz_sent(x, keep_first = TRUE)
            # Remove empty sentences
            x <- x[x != ""]
            return(x)
    }

### Step 3: get \(k\)-gram frequency counts

We can now obtain \(k\)-gram frequency counts from Shakespeare with a single command, using the function `kgram_freqs()`. The following stores \(k\)-gram counts for \(k\)-grams of order less than or equal to \(N = 5\):

    freqs <- kgram_freqs(txt_con, # Read Shakespeare's text from connection
                         N = 5, # Store k-gram counts for k <= 5
                         .preprocess = .preprocess,  # preprocess text
                         .tknz_sent = .tknz_sent, # tokenize sentences
                         verbose = FALSE, # If TRUE, prints current progress info
                         max_lines = Inf, # Read until the end-of-file
                         batch_size = 100 # Read text in batches of 100 lines
                         )
    freqs
    #> A k-gram frequency table.

The object `freqs` is an object of class `kgram_freqs`, i.e. a \(k\)-gram frequency table. We can obtain a first informative summary of what this object contains by calling `summary()`:

    summary(freqs)
    #> A k-gram frequency table.
    #>
    #> Parameters:
    #> * N: 5
    #> * V: 3046
    #>
    #> Number of words in training corpus:
    #> * W: 26147
    #>
    #> Number of distinct k-grams with positive counts:
    #> * 1-grams:3048
    #> * 2-grams:14388
    #> * 3-grams:21207
    #> * 4-grams:22705
    #> * 5-grams:22974

The parameter `V` is the size of the dictionary, which was created behind the scenes by `kgram_freqs()`, using all words encountered in the text. In alternative, we could have used a pre-specified dictionary through the argument `dict`, and specify whether new words (not present in the original dictionary) should be added to it, or be replaced by an Unknown-Word (UNK) token, by the argument `open_dict`; see `?kgram_freqs` for further details. The number of distinct unigrams is greater than the size of the dictionary, because the former also includes the special BOS and EOS tokens.

Notice that the functions `.preprocess()` and `.tknz_sent()` we defined above are passed as arguments of `kgram_freqs()`3. These are also saved in the final `kgram_freqs` object, and are by default applied also to inputs at prediction time.

The following shows how to query \(k\)-gram counts from the frequency table created above:4

    # Query some simple unigrams and bigrams
    query(freqs, c("leonato", "enter leonato", "thy", "smartphones"))
    #> [1] 38  6 52  0
    # Query k-grams at the beginning or end of a sentence
    query(freqs, c(BOS() %+% BOS() %+% "i", "love" %+% EOS()))
    #> [1] 208   0
    # Total number of words processed
    query(freqs, "")
    #> [1] 26147
    # Total number of sentences processed
    query(freqs, EOS())
    #> [1] 2243

The most important use of `kgram_freqs` objects is to create language models, as we illustrate in the next step.

### Step 4. Build the final language model

`kgrams` provides support for creating language models using several classical smoothing techniques. The list of smoothers currently supported by `kgrams` can be retrieved through:

    smoothers()
    #> [1] "ml"    "add_k" "abs"   "kn"    "mkn"   "sbo"   "wb"

The documentation page `?smoothers` provides a list of original references for the various smoothers. We will use Interpolated Kneser-Ney smoothing (Kneser and Ney 1995; see also Chen and Goodman 1999), which goes under the code `"kn"`. We can get some usage help for this method through the command:

    info("kn")
    #> Interpolated Kneser-Ney
    #>  * code: 'kn'
    #>  * parameters: D
    #>  * constraints: 0 <= D <= 1

As shown above, Kneser-Ney has one parameter \(D\), which is the discount applied to bare \(k\)-gram frequency counts or continuation counts. We will initialize the model with \(D = 0.75\), and later tune this parameter through a test corpus.

To train a language model with the \(k\)-gram counts stored in `freqs`, use:

    kn <- language_model(freqs, "kn", D = 0.75)
    kn
    #> A k-gram language model.

This will create a `language_model` object, which can be used to obtain word continuation and sentence probabilities. Let us first get a summary of our final model:

    summary(kn)
    #> A k-gram language model.
    #>
    #> Smoother:
    #> * 'kn'.
    #>
    #> Parameters:
    #> * N: 5
    #> * V: 3046
    #> * D: 0.75
    #>
    #> Number of words in training corpus:
    #> * W: 26147
    #>
    #> Number of distinct k-grams with positive counts:
    #> * 1-grams:3048
    #> * 2-grams:14388
    #> * 3-grams:21207
    #> * 4-grams:22705
    #> * 5-grams:22974

The parameter `D` can be accessed and modified through the functions `parameters()` and `param()`, which have a similar interface to the base R function `attributes()` and `attr()`:

    parameters(kn)
    #> $N
    #> [1] 5
    #>
    #> $V
    #> [1] 3046
    #>
    #> $D
    #> [1] 0.75
    param(kn, "D")
    #> [1] 0.75
    param(kn, "D") <- 0.6
    param(kn, "D")
    #> [1] 0.6
    param(kn, "D") <- 0.75

We can also modify the order of the \(k\)-gram model, by choosing any number less than or equal to \(N = 5\) (since we stored up to \(5\)-gram counts):

    param(kn, "N") <- 4 # 'kn' uses only 1:4-grams
    param(kn, "N")
    #> [1] 4
    param(kn, "N") <- 5 # 'kn' uses also 5-grams

In the next section we show how to use this language model for basic tasks such as predicting word and sentence probabilities, and for more complex tasks such as computing perplexities and generating random text.

## Using `language_model` objects

So far we have created a `language_model` object using Interpolated Kneser-Ney as smoothing method. In this section we show how to:

- Obtain word continuation and sentence probabilities.
- Generate random text by sampling from the language model probability distribution.
- Compute the language model’s perplexity on a test corpus.

### Word continuation and sentence probabilities

We can obtain both sentence probabilities and word continuation probabilities through the function `probability()`. This is generic on the first argument, which can be a `character` for sentence probabilities, or a `word_context` expression for continuation probabilities.

Sentence probabilities can be obtained as follows (the first two are sentences from the training corpus):

    probability(c("Did he break out into tears?",
                  "I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books.",
                  "We are predicting sentence probabilities."
                  ),
                model = kn
                )
    #> [1] 2.753343e-05 8.732186e-07 9.343674e-19

Behind the scenes, the same `.preprocess()` and `.tknz_sent()` functions used during training are being applied to the input. We can turn off this behaviour by explicitly specifying the `.preprocess` and `.tknz_sent` arguments of `probability()`.

Word continuation probabilities are the conditional probabilities of words following some given context. For instance, the probability that the words `"tears"` or `"pieces"` will follow the context `"Did he break out into"` are computed as follows:

    probability("tears" %|% "Did he break out into", model = kn)
    #> [1] 0.5813743
    probability("pieces" %|% "Did he break out into", model = kn)
    #> [1] 9.993316e-06

The operator `%|%` takes as input a character vector on its left-hand side, i.e. the list of candidate words, and a length one character vector on its right-hand side, i.e. the given context. If the context has more than \(N - 1\) words (where \(N\) is the order of the language model, five in our case), only the last \(N - 1\) words are used for prediction.

### Generating random text

We can sample sentences from the probability distribution defined by our language model using `sample_sentences()`. For instance:

    set.seed(840)
    sample_sentences(model = kn,
                     n = 10,
                     max_length = 10
                     )
    #>  [1] "i have studied officers ; <EOS>"
    #>  [2] "truly by in your company thing that you ask for [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [3] "i protest i love the gentleman is wise ; <EOS>"
    #>  [4] "for it . <EOS>"
    #>  [5] "the best befits can i for your own hobbyhorses hence [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [6] "but by this travail fit the length july cham's beard [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [7] "don pedro she doth well as being some attires and [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [8] "exeunt all ladies only spots of grey all the wealth [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [9] "heighho ! <EOS>"
    #> [10] "exit margaret ursula friar . <EOS>"

The sampling is performed word by word, and the output is truncated if no `EOS` token is found after sampling `max_length` words.

We can also sample with a temperature different from one. The temperature transformation of a probability distribution \(p(i)\) is defined by:

\[p_t(i) = \dfrac{\exp(\log{p(i)} / t)} {Z(t)},\] where \(Z(t)\) is the partition function, defined in such a way that \(\sum _i p_t(i) \equiv 1\). Intuitively, higher and lower temperatures make the original probability distribution smoother and rougher, respectively. By making a physical analogy, we can think of less probable words as states with higher energies, and the effect of higher (lower) temperatures is to make more (less) likely to excite these high energy states.

We can test the effects of temperature on our Shakespeare-inspired language model, by changing the parameter `t` of `sample_sentences()` (notice that the default `t = 1` corresponds to the original distribution):

    sample_sentences(model = kn,
                     n = 10,
                     max_length = 10,
                     t = 0.1 # low temperature
                     )
    #>  [1] "i will not have to do with you . <EOS>"
    #>  [2] "i will go before and show him their examination . [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [3] "i will not be sworn but love may transform me [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [4] "i will not have to do with you . <EOS>"
    #>  [5] "i will not be sworn but love may transform me [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [6] "i will not think it . <EOS>"
    #>  [7] "i will not be sworn but love may transform me [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [8] "i will not be sworn but love may transform me [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [9] "i will not be sworn but love may transform me [...] (truncated output)"
    #> [10] "i will not have to do with you . <EOS>"
    sample_sentences(model = kn,
                     n = 10,
                     max_length = 10,
                     t = 10 # high temperature
                     )
    #>  [1] "pleasantspirited minds wants valuing peace speech libertines after offered being [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [2] "braggarts smell fiveandthirty from possible knowest sickness tonight panders agony [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [3] "show'd where's give intelligence princes finer tire scab brought rearward [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [4] "deserved heart's evening virtues holds c hadst persuasion can finer [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [5] "churchbench modesty thinks noncome remorse epitaphs consented mortifying whom hath [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [6] "expectation impossible yielded deceive wedding mouth unclasp absentand qualify twelve [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [7] "giddily certainly nightraven prized grief laugh claw invincible tyrant blessed [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [8] "'i senseless beat time denies 'hundred ten forth hire' reenter [...] (truncated output)"
    #>  [9] "toothache laughed civil kill'd mean hero's yea foundation deformed appetite [...] (truncated output)"
    #> [10] "hour studied figure nine leonato enough ever herself confess authority [...] (truncated output)"

As explained above, sampling with low temperature gives much more weight to probable sentences, and indeed the output is very repetitive. On the contrary, high temperature makes sentence probabilities more uniform, and in fact our output above looks quite random.

### Compute language model’s perplexities

Perplexity is a standard evaluation metric for the overall performance of a language model. It is given by \(P = e^H\), where \(H\) is the cross-entropy of the language model sentence probability distribution against a test corpus empirical distribution:

\[ H = - \dfrac{1}{W}\sum _s\ \ln (\text {Prob}(s)) \] Here \(W\) is total number of words in the test corpus (following Ref. (Chen and Goodman 1999), we include counts of the EOS token, but not the BOS token, in \(W\)), and the sum extends over all sentences in the test corpus. Perplexity does not give direct information on the performance of a language model in a specific end-to-end task, but is often found to correlate with the latter, which provides a practical justification for the use of this metric. Notice that better models are associated with lower perplexities, and that \(H\) is proportional to the negative log-likelihood of the corpus under the language model assumption.

Perplexities can be computed in `kgrams` using the function `perplexity()`, which can read text both from a `character` vector and from a `connection`. We will take our test corpus again from Shakespeare’s opus, specifically the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which is example data from `kgrams` namespace:

    midsummer[840]
    #> [1] " when truth kills truth o devilishholy fray !"

We can compute the perplexity of our Kneser-Ney \(5\)-gram model `kn` against this corpus as follows:

    perplexity(midsummer, model = kn)
    #> [1] 376.5044

We can use perplexity to tune our model parameter \(D\). We compute perplexity over a grid of values for `D` and plot the results. We do this for the \(k\)-gram models with \(k \in \{2, 3, 4, 5\}\):

    D_grid <- seq(from = 0.5, to = 0.99, by = 0.01)
    FUN <- function(D, N) {
            param(kn, "N") <- N
            param(kn, "D") <- D
            perplexity(midsummer, model = kn)
    }
    P_grid <- lapply(2:5, function(N) sapply(D_grid, FUN, N = N))
    oldpar <- par(mar = c(2, 2, 1, 1))
    plot(D_grid, P_grid[[1]], type = "n", xlab = "D", ylab = "Perplexity", ylim = c(300, 500))
    lines(D_grid, P_grid[[1]], col = "red")
    lines(D_grid, P_grid[[2]], col = "chartreuse")
    lines(D_grid, P_grid[[3]], col = "blue")
    lines(D_grid, P_grid[[4]], col = "black")

Perplexity as a function of the discount parameter of Interpolated Kneser-Ney 2-gram (red), 3-gram (green), 4-gram (blue) and 5-gram (black) models.

    par(oldpar)

We see that the optimal choices for `D` are close to its maximum allowed value `D = 1`, for which the performance of the 2-gram model is slightly worse than the higher order models, and that the 5-gram model performs generally worse than the 3-gram and 4-gram models. Indeed, the optimized perplexities for the various \(k\)-gram orders are given by:

    sapply(c("2-gram" = 1, "3-gram" = 2, "4-gram" = 3, "5-gram" = 4),
           function(N) min(P_grid[[N]])
           )
    #>   2-gram   3-gram   4-gram   5-gram
    #> 324.5591 320.2785 319.6052 319.7010

which shows that the best performing model is the 4-gram one, while it seems that the 5-gram model is starting to overfit (which is not very surprising, given the ridiculously small size of our training corpus!).

## Conclusions

In this vignette I have shown how to implement and explore \(k\)-gram language models in R using `kgrams`. For further help, you can consult the reference page of the `kgrams` website. Development of `kgrams` takes place on its GitHub repository. If you find a bug, please let me know by opening an issue on GitHub, and if you have any ideas or proposals for improvement, please feel welcome to send a pull request, or simply an e-mail at vgherard@sissa.it.

## References

Chen, Stanley F, and Joshua Goodman. 1999. “An Empirical Study of Smoothing Techniques for Language Modeling.” Computer Speech & Language 13 (4): 359–94.
Kneser, Reinhard, and H. Ney. 1995. “Improved Backing-Off for m-Gram Language Modeling.” 1995 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 1: 181–184 vol.1.
Pibiri, Giulio Ermanno, and Rossano Venturini. 2019. “Handling Massive n -Gram Datasets Efficiently.” ACM Transactions on Information Systems 37 (2): 1–41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3302913.

1. Here and below, when we talk about “language models,” we always refer to word-level language models. In particular, a \(k\)-gram is a \(k\)-tuple of words.↩︎

2. Perplexity is a standard evaluation metric for language models, based on the model’s sentence probability distribution cross-entropy with the empirical distribution of a test corpus. It is described in some more detail in this Subsection.↩︎

3. Strictly speaking, a single argument `.preprocess` would suffice, as the processed input is (symbolically) `.tknz_sent(.preprocess(input))`. Having two separate arguments for preprocessing and sentence tokenization has a couple of advantages, as explained in `?kgram_freqs`.↩︎

4. The string concatenation operator `%+%` is equivalent to `paste(lhs, rhs)`. Also, the helpers `BOS()`, `EOS()` and `UNK()` return the BOS, EOS and UNK tokens, respectively.↩︎