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perltextclassificationentropy

Cross Entropy for Language modelling


im currently working on a classification task using language modelling. The first part of the project involved using n-gram language models to classify documents using c5.0. The final part of the project requires me to use cross entropy to model each class and classify test cases against these models.

Does anyone have have experience in using cross entropy, or links to information about how to use a cross entropy model for sampling data? Any information at all would be great! Thanks


Solution

  • You can get theoretic background on using cross-entropy with language models on various textbooks, e.g. "Speech and language processing" by Jurafsky & Martin, pages 116-118 in the 2nd edition. As to concrete usage, in most language modeling tools the cross-entropy is not directly measured, but the 'Perplexity', which is the exp of the cross-entropy. The perplexity, in turn, can be used to classify documents. see, e.g. the documentation for the command 'evallm' in SLM, the Carnegie-Melon university language modeling tools (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/SLM/toolkit_documentation.html)

    good luck :)