Unpacking the Concepts of Perplexity and Burstiness in AI

The Chief AI Officer
3 min readJun 23, 2023

The rapid evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) space has revolutionized our work across industries and has opened the doors to a world of seemingly endless possibilities. With AI becoming an integral part of modern businesses, many entrepreneurs are seeking ways to give voice to their machines and make them communicate using natural language models with natural processes.

At the heart of this language modelling lies two strange yet important terms — “Perplexity” and “Burstiness”. But what do these two have to do with AI?

What is Perplexity?

Perplexity is essentially a measure of how difficult it is for a language model to predict the next word in a sentence based on the previous words given so far. The less accurate is our AI at guessing the next words, the higher the perplexity ranking. Think of perplexity as the AI trying to read a complex grammatical structure, more concisely, a longer sentence. In language processing, the complexity of a sentence increases proportionately with the length of the strings.

Higher perplexities indicate a more complex text, while lower perplexity indicates less complex sentences.

What is Burstiness?

Burstiness is based on the standard deviation of sentence lengths. It is comparable to the efficiency of the text.The bigger the standard deviation of sentence lengths, the better its spoke of at comprehending its environment and environmentally mapping the intended message with relative ease to an audience. Burstiness is an example of probabilities in natural language. If you look at natural language, you will notice that it is not always made up of absurdly long sentences nor is made up of breathtakingly short ones.

Complex concepts are often explained with caution into one long sentence, and whereas simple concepts are piped out in many short sentences. To reality-check this concept more, let’s look at a simple sentence and a longer string. Which one do resonate better?

Simple phrase: Money makes the world go round.
Longer construct: Money has become such a thorough ingrained accepted outcome in all types of present day’s societies that many vie its input as dramatically influential it in the past.

In comparison to the ‘shorter sentence’ methodology, longer strings tend to keep the principle story concise yet packed with more detailed texture as there is more token data to embed information in. Consequently, this increases the keyword invocation rate.

Improving Language Prediction with Perplexity and Burstiness

When training AI to mimic language-based conversation realistically, it’s important to consider both perplexity and burstiness. As previously stated, perplexity measures how well the AI is able to predict the next word given its previous context, whereas burstiness measures the variety of the AI’s sentences. For example, if it was aiming for a human conversation, it would need to accurately navigate unfamiliar contexts and be fluent in both positive and negative sentiment.

These can both be improved when writing, by adding dimensions and understanding of language structure. For example, to have higher perplexity, our AI would benefit from more specialist vocabulary and the use of complex sentence construction. We could also build complexity in bursts, including natural paragraphs of both short and longer sentences to keep the interest. It also allows for more natural sounding conversations, allowing the user to relate better and more easily.

Conclusion

The influx of robotic AI about to flood the global working space will probably invoke an entirely new wave of work that warrants an unprecedented level of quality whenever it’s launched. For this reason, entrepreneurs should not be too shy to engage complex techniques like perplexity and burstiness in training their Ai to embrace rapid progress and improved cognitive accuracy.

When writing your post, these considerations state the importance of fine-tuning grammar operations and considering long and complex sentences alongside shorter ones to further your AI’s intellectual capacity. By experimenting with concepts and understanding information flow using AI methods you can improve the language predictions and outperform contemporary alternatives.

So bottom line? If you want your AI to reach its maximum potential, it requires engagement in both perplexity and burstiness for smooth language navigation. After all, AI only has as much power as what’s inputted on it!

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The Chief AI Officer

I help experts double their LTV in 8 weeks by helping them launch their first AI software product to their warm audience.