Same Representation, Different Attentions: Shareable Sentence Representation Learning from Multiple Tasks

Same Representation, Different Attentions: Shareable Sentence Representation Learning from Multiple Tasks

Renjie Zheng, Junkun Chen, Xipeng Qiu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4616-4622. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/642

Distributed representation plays an important role in deep learning based natural language processing. However, the representation of a sentence often varies in different tasks, which is usually learned from scratch and suffers from the limited amounts of training data. In this paper, we claim that a good sentence representation should be invariant and can benefit the various subsequent tasks. To achieve this purpose, we propose a new scheme of information sharing for multi-task learning. More specifically, all tasks share the same sentence representation and each task can select the task-specific information from the shared sentence representation with attention mechanisms. The query vector of each task's attention could be either static parameters or generated dynamically. We conduct extensive experiments on 16 different text classification tasks, which demonstrate the benefits of our architecture. Source codes of this paper are available on Github.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Transfer, Adaptation, Multi-task Learning
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning: Deep Learning