scholarly journals Evaluating Multilingual BERT for Estonian

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Kittask ◽  
Kirill Milintsevich ◽  
Kairit Sirts
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Text Classification ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Neural Models ◽  
Comparable Level ◽  
Art Performance ◽  
Multiple Languages

Recently, large pre-trained language models, such as BERT, have reached state-of-the-art performance in many natural language processing tasks, but for many languages, including Estonian, BERT models are not yet available. However, there exist several multilingual BERT models that can handle multiple languages simultaneously and that have been trained also on Estonian data. In this paper, we evaluate four multilingual models—multilingual BERT, multilingual distilled BERT, XLM and XLM-RoBERTa—on several NLP tasks including POS and morphological tagging, NER and text classification. Our aim is to establish a comparison between these multilingual BERT models and the existing baseline neural models for these tasks. Our results show that multilingual BERT models can generalise well on different Estonian NLP tasks outperforming all baselines models for POS and morphological tagging and text classification, and reaching the comparable level with the best baseline for NER, with XLM-RoBERTa achieving the highest results compared with other multilingual models.

scholarly journals Towards Improving Open Student Answer Assessment using Pretrained Transformers

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nisrine Ait Khayi ◽  
Vasile Rus ◽  
Lasang Tamang
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Transfer Learning ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Text Classification ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Assessment Task ◽  
Fine Tune

The transfer learning pretraining-finetuning  paradigm has revolutionized the natural language processing field yielding state-of the art results in  several subfields such as text classification and question answering. However, little work has been done investigating pretrained language models for the  open student answer assessment task. In this paper, we fine tune pretrained T5, BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, ALBERT and XLNet models on the DT-Grade dataset which contains freely generated (or open) student answers together with judgment of their correctness. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of these models based on the transfer learning pretraining-finetuning paradigm for open student answer assessment. An improvement of 8%-15% in accuracy was obtained over previous methods. Particularly, a T5 based method led to state-of-the-art results with an accuracy and F1 score of 0.88.

scholarly journals Biomedical Concept Recognition Using Deep Neural Sequence Models

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Negacy D. Hailu ◽  
Michael Bada ◽  
Asmelash Teka Hadgu ◽  
Lawrence E. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Conditional Random Field ◽  
Concept Recognition ◽  
Performance Improvements ◽  
Art Performance

AbstractBackgroundthe automated identification of mentions of ontological concepts in natural language texts is a central task in biomedical information extraction. Despite more than a decade of effort, performance in this task remains below the level necessary for many applications.Resultsrecently, applications of deep learning in natural language processing have demonstrated striking improvements over previously state-of-the-art performance in many related natural language processing tasks. Here we demonstrate similarly striking performance improvements in recognizing biomedical ontology concepts in full text journal articles using deep learning techniques originally developed for machine translation. For example, our best performing system improves the performance of the previous state-of-the-art in recognizing terms in the Gene Ontology Biological Process hierarchy, from a previous best F1 score of 0.40 to an F1 of 0.70, nearly halving the error rate. Nearly all other ontologies show similar performance improvements.ConclusionsA two-stage concept recognition system, which is a conditional random field model for span detection followed by a deep neural sequence model for normalization, improves the state-of-the-art performance for biomedical concept recognition. Treating the biomedical concept normalization task as a sequence-to-sequence mapping task similar to neural machine translation improves performance.

scholarly journals Text: An R-package for Analyzing and Visualizing Human Language Using Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Nils Erik Kjell ◽  
H. Andrew Schwartz ◽  
Salvatore Giorgi
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Rating Scale ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
R Package ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Categorical Variables ◽  
Human Language

The language that individuals use for expressing themselves contains rich psychological information. Recent significant advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL), namely transformers, have resulted in large performance gains in tasks related to understanding natural language such as machine translation. However, these state-of-the-art methods have not yet been made easily accessible for psychology researchers, nor designed to be optimal for human-level analyses. This tutorial introduces text (www.r-text.org), a new R-package for analyzing and visualizing human language using transformers, the latest techniques from NLP and DL. Text is both a modular solution for accessing state-of-the-art language models and an end-to-end solution catered for human-level analyses. Hence, text provides user-friendly functions tailored to test hypotheses in social sciences for both relatively small and large datasets. This tutorial describes useful methods for analyzing text, providing functions with reliable defaults that can be used off-the-shelf as well as providing a framework for the advanced users to build on for novel techniques and analysis pipelines. The reader learns about six methods: 1) textEmbed: to transform text to traditional or modern transformer-based word embeddings (i.e., numeric representations of words); 2) textTrain: to examine the relationships between text and numeric/categorical variables; 3) textSimilarity and 4) textSimilarityTest: to computing semantic similarity scores between texts and significance test the difference in meaning between two sets of texts; and 5) textProjection and 6) textProjectionPlot: to examine and visualize text within the embedding space according to latent or specified construct dimensions (e.g., low to high rating scale scores).

scholarly journals Leveraging Pre-trained Checkpoints for Sequence Generation Tasks

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 264-280
Author(s):  
Sascha Rothe ◽  
Shashi Narayan ◽  
Aliaksei Severyn
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Text Summarization ◽  
Neural Models ◽  
Language Understanding ◽  
Sequence Generation ◽  
Compute Time

Unsupervised pre-training of large neural models has recently revolutionized Natural Language Processing. By warm-starting from the publicly released checkpoints, NLP practitioners have pushed the state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks while saving significant amounts of compute time. So far the focus has been mainly on the Natural Language Understanding tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of pre-trained checkpoints for Sequence Generation. We developed a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model that is compatible with publicly available pre-trained BERT, GPT-2, and RoBERTa checkpoints and conducted an extensive empirical study on the utility of initializing our model, both encoder and decoder, with these checkpoints. Our models result in new state-of-the-art results on Machine Translation, Text Summarization, Sentence Splitting, and Sentence Fusion.

scholarly journals A Comprehensive Exploration of Pre-training Language Models

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Guo
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Language Models

Recently, the development of pre-trained language models has brought natural language processing (NLP) tasks to the new state-of-the-art. In this paper we explore the efficiency of various pre-trained language models. We pre-train a list of transformer-based models with the same amount of text and the same training steps. The experimental results shows that the most improvement upon the origin BERT is adding the RNN-layer to capture more contextual information for the transformer-encoder layers.

scholarly journals Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 135-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Bojanowski ◽  
Edouard Grave ◽  
Armand Joulin ◽  
Tomas Mikolov
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Vector Representation ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Word Similarity ◽  
Art Performance ◽  
N Gram

Continuous word representations, trained on large unlabeled corpora are useful for many natural language processing tasks. Popular models that learn such representations ignore the morphology of words, by assigning a distinct vector to each word. This is a limitation, especially for languages with large vocabularies and many rare words. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on the skipgram model, where each word is represented as a bag of character n-grams. A vector representation is associated to each character n-gram; words being represented as the sum of these representations. Our method is fast, allowing to train models on large corpora quickly and allows us to compute word representations for words that did not appear in the training data. We evaluate our word representations on nine different languages, both on word similarity and analogy tasks. By comparing to recently proposed morphological word representations, we show that our vectors achieve state-of-the-art performance on these tasks.

scholarly journals Reinforced Self-Attention Network: a Hybrid of Hard and Soft Attention for Sequence Modeling

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Shen ◽  
Tianyi Zhou ◽  
Guodong Long ◽  
Jing Jiang ◽  
Sen Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Mutual Benefit ◽  
Fusion Model ◽  
Attention Network ◽  
Sequence Modeling ◽  
Policy Gradient ◽  
Art Performance

Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA.  It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and the Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets. 

scholarly journals A Comprehensive Exploration of Pre-training Language Models

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong Guo
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Language Models

Recently, the development of pre-trained language models has brought natural language processing (NLP) tasks to the new state-of-the-art. In this paper we explore the efficiency of various pre-trained language models. We pre-train a list of transformer-based models with the same amount of text and the same training steps. The experimental results shows that the most improvement upon the origin BERT is adding the RNN-layer to capture more contextual information for the transformer-encoder layers.

scholarly journals Towards the Natural Language Processing as Spelling Correction for Offline Handwritten Text Recognition Systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 7711
Author(s):  
Arthur Flor de Sousa Neto ◽  
Byron Leite Dantas Bezerra ◽  
Alejandro Héctor Toselli
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Network Architecture ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Text Recognition ◽  
Spelling Correction ◽  
Handwritten Text ◽  
Handwritten Text Recognition

The increasing portability of physical manuscripts to the digital environment makes it common for systems to offer automatic mechanisms for offline Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). However, several scenarios and writing variations bring challenges in recognition accuracy, and, to minimize this problem, optical models can be used with language models to assist in decoding text. Thus, with the aim of improving results, dictionaries of characters and words are generated from the dataset and linguistic restrictions are created in the recognition process. In this way, this work proposes the use of spelling correction techniques for text post-processing to achieve better results and eliminate the linguistic dependence between the optical model and the decoding stage. In addition, an encoder–decoder neural network architecture in conjunction with a training methodology are developed and presented to achieve the goal of spelling correction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach, we conducted an experiment on five datasets of text lines, widely known in the field of HTR, three state-of-the-art Optical Models for text recognition and eight spelling correction techniques, among traditional statistics and current approaches of neural networks in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Finally, our proposed spelling correction model is analyzed statistically through HTR system metrics, reaching an average sentence correction of 54% higher than the state-of-the-art method of decoding in the tested datasets.

scholarly journals Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Yu Gu ◽  
Robert Tinn ◽  
Hao Cheng ◽  
Michael Lucas ◽  
Naoto Usuyama ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Language Models ◽  
General Domain ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
And Task

Pretraining large neural language models, such as BERT, has led to impressive gains on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, most pretraining efforts focus on general domain corpora, such as newswire and Web. A prevailing assumption is that even domain-specific pretraining can benefit by starting from general-domain language models. In this article, we challenge this assumption by showing that for domains with abundant unlabeled text, such as biomedicine, pretraining language models from scratch results in substantial gains over continual pretraining of general-domain language models. To facilitate this investigation, we compile a comprehensive biomedical NLP benchmark from publicly available datasets. Our experiments show that domain-specific pretraining serves as a solid foundation for a wide range of biomedical NLP tasks, leading to new state-of-the-art results across the board. Further, in conducting a thorough evaluation of modeling choices, both for pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning, we discover that some common practices are unnecessary with BERT models, such as using complex tagging schemes in named entity recognition. To help accelerate research in biomedical NLP, we have released our state-of-the-art pretrained and task-specific models for the community, and created a leaderboard featuring our BLURB benchmark (short for Biomedical Language Understanding & Reasoning Benchmark) at https://aka.ms/BLURB .

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