  Self-normalizing discriminative models approximate the normalized probability
of a class without having to compute the partition function. In the context of
language modeling, this property is particularly appealing as it may
significantly reduce run-times due to large word vocabularies. In this study,
we provide a comprehensive investigation of language modeling
self-normalization. First, we theoretically analyze the inherent
self-normalization properties of Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) language
models. Then, we compare them empirically to softmax-based approaches, which
are self-normalized using explicit regularization, and suggest a hybrid model
with compelling properties. Finally, we uncover a surprising negative
correlation between self-normalization and perplexity across the board, as well
as some regularity in the observed errors, which may potentially be used for
improving self-normalization algorithms in the future.

Computation and Language