Inductive transfer learning has greatly impacted computer vision, but
existing approaches in NLP still require task-specific modifications and
training from scratch. We propose Universal Language Model Fine-tuning
(ULMFiT), an effective transfer learning method that can be applied to any task
in NLP, and introduce techniques that are key for fine-tuning a language model.
Our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on six text
classification tasks, reducing the error by 18-24% on the majority of datasets.
Furthermore, with only 100 labeled examples, it matches the performance of
training from scratch on 100x more data. We open-source our pretrained models
and code.Comment: ACL 2018, fixed denominator in Equation 3, line