Adversarial Multi-task Learning for Text Classification

Neural network models have shown their promising opportunities for multi-task learning, which focus on learning the shared layers to extract the common and task-invariant features. However, in most existing approaches, the extracted shared features are prone to be contaminated by task-specific features or the noise brought by other tasks. In this paper, we propose an adversarial multi-task learning framework, alleviating the shared and private latent feature spaces from interfering with each other. We conduct extensive experiments on 16 different text classification tasks, which demonstrates the benefits of our approach. Besides, we show that the shared knowledge learned by our proposed model can be regarded as off-the-shelf knowledge and easily transferred to new tasks. The datasets of all 16 tasks are publicly available at \url{http://nlp.fudan.edu.cn/data/}Comment: Accepted by ACL201

A Curriculum Learning Approach for Multi-domain Text Classification Using Keyword weight Ranking

Text classification is a very classic NLP task, but it has two prominent shortcomings: On the one hand, text classification is deeply domain-dependent. That is, a classifier trained on the corpus of one domain may not perform so well in another domain. On the other hand, text classification models require a lot of annotated data for training. However, for some domains, there may not exist enough annotated data. Therefore, it is valuable to investigate how to efficiently utilize text data from different domains to improve the performance of models in various domains. Some multi-domain text classification models are trained by adversarial training to extract shared features among all domains and the specific features of each domain. We noted that the distinctness of the domain-specific features is different, so in this paper, we propose to use a curriculum learning strategy based on keyword weight ranking to improve the performance of multi-domain text classification models. The experimental results on the Amazon review and FDU-MTL datasets show that our curriculum learning strategy effectively improves the performance of multi-domain text classification models based on adversarial learning and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP2023 (currently under review

DEFTri: A Few-Shot Label Fused Contextual Representation Learning For Product Defect Triage in e-Commerce

Defect Triage is a time-sensitive and critical process in a large-scale agile software development lifecycle for e-commerce. Inefficiencies arising from human and process dependencies in this domain have motivated research in automated approaches using machine learning to accurately assign defects to qualified teams. This work proposes a novel framework for automated defect triage (DEFTri) using fine-tuned state-of-the-art pre-trained BERT on labels fused text embeddings to improve contextual representations from human-generated product defects. For our multi-label text classification defect triage task, we also introduce a Walmart proprietary dataset of product defects using weak supervision and adversarial learning, in a few-shot setting.Comment: In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP ECNLP 5 2022 Pages 1-

Adversarial Connective-exploiting Networks for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Implicit discourse relation classification is of great challenge due to the lack of connectives as strong linguistic cues, which motivates the use of annotated implicit connectives to improve the recognition. We propose a feature imitation framework in which an implicit relation network is driven to learn from another neural network with access to connectives, and thus encouraged to extract similarly salient features for accurate classification. We develop an adversarial model to enable an adaptive imitation scheme through competition between the implicit network and a rival feature discriminator. Our method effectively transfers discriminability of connectives to the implicit features, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PDTB benchmark.Comment: To appear in ACL201

SMART: Robust and Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-trained Natural Language Models through Principled Regularized Optimization

Transfer learning has fundamentally changed the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) research. Many existing state-of-the-art models are first pre-trained on a large text corpus and then fine-tuned on downstream tasks. However, due to limited data resources from downstream tasks and the extremely large capacity of pre-trained models, aggressive fine-tuning often causes the adapted model to overfit the data of downstream tasks and forget the knowledge of the pre-trained model. To address the above issue in a more principled manner, we propose a new computational framework for robust and efficient fine-tuning for pre-trained language models. Specifically, our proposed framework contains two important ingredients: 1. Smoothness-inducing regularization, which effectively manages the capacity of the model; 2. Bregman proximal point optimization, which is a class of trust-region methods and can prevent knowledge forgetting. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on multiple NLP benchmarks.Comment: The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020