Hierarchical Bayesian Language Modelling for the Linguistically Informed

In this work I address the challenge of augmenting n-gram language models according to prior linguistic intuitions. I argue that the family of hierarchical Pitman-Yor language models is an attractive vehicle through which to address the problem, and demonstrate the approach by proposing a model for German compounds. In an empirical evaluation, the model outperforms the Kneser-Ney model in terms of perplexity, and achieves preliminary improvements in English-German translation.