%0 Conference Proceedings %T Show Some Love to Your n-grams: A Bit of Progress and Stronger n-gram Language Modeling Baselines %A Shareghi, Ehsan %A Gerz, Daniela %A Vulić, Ivan %A Korhonen, Anna %Y Burstein, Jill %Y Doran, Christy %Y Solorio, Thamar %S Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) %D 2019 %8 June %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Minneapolis, Minnesota %F shareghi-etal-2019-show %X In recent years neural language models (LMs) have set the state-of-the-art performance for several benchmarking datasets. While the reasons for their success and their computational demand are well-documented, a comparison between neural models and more recent developments in n-gram models is neglected. In this paper, we examine the recent progress in n-gram literature, running experiments on 50 languages covering all morphological language families. Experimental results illustrate that a simple extension of Modified Kneser-Ney outperforms an lstm language model on 42 languages while a word-level Bayesian n-gram LM (Shareghi et al., 2017) outperforms the character-aware neural model (Kim et al., 2016) on average across all languages, and its extension which explicitly injects linguistic knowledge (Gerz et al., 2018) on 8 languages. Further experiments on larger Europarl datasets for 3 languages indicate that neural architectures are able to outperform computationally much cheaper n-gram models: n-gram training is up to 15,000x quicker. Our experiments illustrate that standalone n-gram models lend themselves as natural choices for resource-lean or morphologically rich languages, while the recent progress has significantly improved their accuracy. %R 10.18653/v1/N19-1417 %U https://aclanthology.org/N19-1417 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1417 %P 4113-4118