N-gram Prediction and Word Difference Representations for Language Modeling

Causal language modeling (CLM) serves as the foundational framework underpinning remarkable successes of recent large language models (LLMs). Despite its success, the training approach for next word prediction poses a potential risk of causing the model to overly focus on local dependencies within a sentence. While prior studies have been introduced to predict future N words simultaneously, they were primarily applied to tasks such as masked language modeling (MLM) and neural machine translation (NMT). In this study, we introduce a simple N-gram prediction framework for the CLM task. Moreover, we introduce word difference representation (WDR) as a surrogate and contextualized target representation during model training on the basis of N-gram prediction framework. To further enhance the quality of next word prediction, we propose an ensemble method that incorporates the future N words' prediction results. Empirical evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets encompassing CLM and NMT tasks demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed methods over the conventional CLM.