147 research outputs found
Machine Learning Models for Efficient and Robust Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) has come of age. For example, semantic role labeling (SRL), which automatically annotates sentences with a labeled graph representing who did what to whom, has in the past ten years seen nearly 40% reduction in error, bringing it to useful accuracy. As a result, a myriad of practitioners now want to deploy NLP systems on billions of documents across many domains. However, state-of-the-art NLP systems are typically not optimized for cross-domain robustness nor computational efficiency. In this dissertation I develop machine learning methods to facilitate fast and robust inference across many common NLP tasks.
First, I describe paired learning and inference algorithms for dynamic feature selection which accelerate inference in linear classifiers, the heart of the fastest NLP models, by 5-10 times. I then present iterated dilated convolutional neural networks (ID-CNNs), a distinct combination of network structure, parameter sharing and training procedures that increase inference speed by 14-20 times with accuracy matching bidirectional LSTMs, the most accurate models for NLP sequence labeling. Finally, I describe linguistically-informed self-attention (LISA), a neural network model that combines multi-head self-attention with multi-task learning to facilitate improved generalization to new domains. We show that incorporating linguistic structure in this way leads to substantial improvements over the previous state-of-the-art (syntax-free) neural network models for SRL, especially when evaluating out-of-domain. I conclude with a brief discussion of potential future directions stemming from my thesis work
Deep Active Learning for Named Entity Recognition
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural
language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However,
this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we
demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced
when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is
sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires
iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture
for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and
word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model
achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task
while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We
carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are
able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the
original training data
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