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Title: Supervised Contextual Embeddings for Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing Tasks

Paper content:
Pre-trained word embeddings are the primary
method for transfer learning in several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks.
Recent
works have focused on using unsupervised
techniques such as language modeling to obtain these embeddings.
In contrast, this work
focuses on extracting representations from
multiple pre-trained supervised models, which
enriches word embeddings with task and domain specific knowledge.
Experiments performed in cross-task, cross-domain and crosslingual settings indicate that such supervised
embeddings are helpful, especially in the lowresource setting, but the extent of gains is dependent on the nature of the task and domain.
Named entity recognition, semantic role labelling, relation extraction etc. can be thought of as primary tasks necessary for solving high level tasks like question answering, summarization etc.
However, labelling large amounts of data at this granularity is not only prohibitively expensive, but also unscalable.
Given that high performance models for these tasks already exist, it is desirable to leverage them for other language understanding tasks.Next, consider the domain adaptation setting where some domains have a lot of data, while others do not.
A model for a low-resource domain would benefit from information in expert models trained on other data rich domains.
Finally, consider the setting of cross-lingual adaptation, a common problem for personal assistants expanding to more languages.
As the number of languages increases, it becomes unfeasible to obtain human annotated data.
Again, the need to adapt to low-resource languages can be met by leveraging models that already exist for high-resource languages.Motivated by the above scenarios, we propose a simple method to transfer (1) supervised knowledge, from (2) multiple sources, (3) in an easy to implement manner.
In our approach, this knowledge is extracted from source models in the form of contextual word embeddings.
We treat preexisting models as embedding extractors, which are used to extract token level representations for an input sentence.
These representations are then combined via a task specific convex combination.Unsupervised transfer learning methods such as ELMo have shown great success for a variety of tasks BID15 .
While they have the advantage of being trained on very large corpora, the training objectives are unsupervised.
We show that in low-resource settings especially, leveraging representations from multiple pre-trained supervised models in related tasks, domains or languages can prove to be beneficial.The common way of supervised transfer learning via fine-tuning can transfer information only from a single source task BID11 .
One way to incorporate information from multiple external sources is via multi-task learning BID5 BID17 .
The limitations of multitask learning are the need for labelled data for the source models, longer training times and complex design decisions (weighing the losses for each task, sampling strategies, and choice of architecture).
In contrast, our plug-and-play approach is simple and does not assume availability of source model data at training time.
Finally, our approach also provides some interpretability (through the parameters of the convex combination) into which source tasks or domains are important for which other tasks and domains.
Cross-task SRL results (with GloVe and ELMo in 1k, 5k and full data settings) have been tabulated in TAB1 has the results for cross-domain NER and TAB2 shows the results for crosslingual transfer on NER.
All the reported numbers are F1 scores.Cross-task SRL With GloVe embeddings, adding the supervised embeddings gives us significant improvements in F1 scores ∼ 5% for 1k and ∼ 7% for 5k examples.
When we use the entire dataset, adding supervised embeddings provides no performance gains.
Examining the learned source task weights in the 1k setting, we find that weights for CP, DP and NER have values 0.41, 0.41 and 0.18 respectively which shows that SRL benefits greatly from syntactic tasks like CP and DP.
This is in agreement with SRL state-of-the-art models BID19 and BID8 which rely on syntactic features.When we replace GloVe with ELMo representations, we see that the baseline model improves by over ∼ 13%, showing that ELMo representations are indeed very strong.
But adding supervised embeddings in the 1k setting further improves upon the ELMo baseline by over ∼ 5%.
A similar improvement of ∼ 5% can be seen in the 5k setting as well.
Our model shows comparable performance as the baseline when we use the entire dataset.
These results suggest that the proposed supervised contextual embeddings further bring about improvements over already strong language model features in a low-resource setting.
This reinforces the learning that when sufficient data is available, supervised signals do not provide information that the model cannot learn by itself from the data alone.Cross-domain NER Supervised embeddings provide an impressive 4% improvement over the GloVe baseline with both 1,000 and 5,000 samples.
Even when we replace GloVe with ELMo, we see an improvement of 3% , indicating that the benefits of using knowledge from other domains is orthogonal to what ELMo can offer.
However, the gains vanish when the full dataset is used, suggesting that knowledge from other domains is particularly useful in the very low-resource setting.
However, if sufficient data is available, the model has enough resources to build upon generic word embeddings.
It is also interesting to note that for this dataset, GloVe based models outperform their ELMo counterparts.
This is probably due to the mismatch in the data used to train ELMo (formal language from the 1 billion word corpus) as opposed to the NER dataset which consists of informal language used in web blogs.Cross-lingual NER We observe substantial gains by exploiting information present in other languages.
For both German and Spanish the performance gains are highest when number of samples is 1,000 , thus validating the suitability of the proposed method for transfer to very low-resource settings.
Even when full dataset is used, we see gains over 1% for both languages.
We propose supervised contextual embeddings, an easy way to incorporate supervised knowledge from multiple pre-existing models.
We perform experiments in the cross-task, cross-domain and cross-lingual setups and find that the proposed embeddings are particularly useful in the lowresource setting.
Our work points to the potential of such embeddings in various downstream tasks in different transfer learning settings.
Future work includes incorporating more tasks, domains and languages, and understanding the relationships among them.
These explorations would build towards our larger vision of building a more complete taxonomy of transfer learning dependencies among NLP tasks, domains and languages.

assistant: text: extract contextual embeddings from off-the-shelf supervised model. Helps downstream NLP models in low-resource settings