On the Representational Capacity of Recurrent Neural Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Nowak, Franz, Svete, Anej, Du, Li, Cotterell, Ryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Nowak, Franz
Svete, Anej
Du, Li
Cotterell, Ryan
author_facet Nowak, Franz
Svete, Anej
Du, Li
Cotterell, Ryan
contents This work investigates the computational expressivity of language models (LMs) based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Siegelmann and Sontag (1992) famously showed that RNNs with rational weights and hidden states and unbounded computation time are Turing complete. However, LMs define weightings over strings in addition to just (unweighted) language membership and the analysis of the computational power of RNN LMs (RLMs) should reflect this. We extend the Turing completeness result to the probabilistic case, showing how a rationally weighted RLM with unbounded computation time can simulate any deterministic probabilistic Turing machine (PTM) with rationally weighted transitions. Since, in practice, RLMs work in real-time, processing a symbol at every time step, we treat the above result as an upper bound on the expressivity of RLMs. We also provide a lower bound by showing that under the restriction to real-time computation, such models can simulate deterministic real-time rational PTMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_12942
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Representational Capacity of Recurrent Neural Language Models
Nowak, Franz
Svete, Anej
Du, Li
Cotterell, Ryan
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
This work investigates the computational expressivity of language models (LMs) based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Siegelmann and Sontag (1992) famously showed that RNNs with rational weights and hidden states and unbounded computation time are Turing complete. However, LMs define weightings over strings in addition to just (unweighted) language membership and the analysis of the computational power of RNN LMs (RLMs) should reflect this. We extend the Turing completeness result to the probabilistic case, showing how a rationally weighted RLM with unbounded computation time can simulate any deterministic probabilistic Turing machine (PTM) with rationally weighted transitions. Since, in practice, RLMs work in real-time, processing a symbol at every time step, we treat the above result as an upper bound on the expressivity of RLMs. We also provide a lower bound by showing that under the restriction to real-time computation, such models can simulate deterministic real-time rational PTMs.
title On the Representational Capacity of Recurrent Neural Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12942