Thursday, July 27, 2017

Deep Learning for NLP Best Practices

Word embeddings

Word embeddings are arguably the most widely known best practice in the recent history of NLP. It is well-known that using pre-trained embeddings helps (Kim, 2014) [12]. The optimal dimensionality of word embeddings is mostly task-dependent: a smaller dimensionality works better for more syntactic tasks such as named entity recognition (Melamud et al., 2016) [44] or part-of-speech (POS) tagging (Plank et al., 2016) [32], while a larger dimensionality is more useful for more semantic tasks such as sentiment analysis (Ruder et al., 2016) [45].

Depth

While we will not reach the depths of computer vision for a while, neural networks in NLP have become progressively deeper. State-of-the-art approaches now regularly use deep Bi-LSTMs, typically consisting of 3-4 layers, e.g. for POS tagging (Plank et al., 2016) and semantic role labelling (He et al., 2017) [33]. Models for some tasks can be even deeper, cf. Google's NMT model with 8 encoder and 8 decoder layers (Wu et al., 2016) [20]. In most cases, however, performance improvements of making the model deeper than 2 layers are minimal (Reimers & Gurevych, 2017) [46].

These observations hold for most sequence tagging and structured prediction problems. For classification, deep or very deep models perform well only with character-level input and shallow word-level models are still the state-of-the-art (Zhang et al., 2015; Conneau et al., 2016; Le et al., 2017) [28, 29, 30].


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