Predicting Performance for Natural Language Processing Tasks

Mengzhou Xia, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Ruochen Xu, Yiming Yang, Graham Neubig


Abstract
Given the complexity of combinations of tasks, languages, and domains in natural language processing (NLP) research, it is computationally prohibitive to exhaustively test newly proposed models on each possible experimental setting. In this work, we attempt to explore the possibility of gaining plausible judgments of how well an NLP model can perform under an experimental setting, without actually training or testing the model. To do so, we build regression models to predict the evaluation score of an NLP experiment given the experimental settings as input. Experimenting on~9 different NLP tasks, we find that our predictors can produce meaningful predictions over unseen languages and different modeling architectures, outperforming reasonable baselines as well as human experts. %we represent experimental settings using an array of features. Going further, we outline how our predictor can be used to find a small subset of representative experiments that should be run in order to obtain plausible predictions for all other experimental settings.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.764
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8625–8646
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.764
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.764
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mengzhou Xia, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Ruochen Xu, Yiming Yang, and Graham Neubig. 2020. Predicting Performance for Natural Language Processing Tasks. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 8625–8646, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Performance for Natural Language Processing Tasks (Xia et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.764.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929262
Code
 xiamengzhou/NLPerf