Strength in Numbers: Averaging and Clustering Effects in Mixture of Experts for Graph-Based Dependency Parsing

Xudong Zhang, Joseph Le Roux, Thierry Charnois


Abstract
We review two features of mixture of experts (MoE) models which we call averaging and clustering effects in the context of graph-based dependency parsers learned in a supervised probabilistic framework. Averaging corresponds to the ensemble combination of parsers and is responsible for variance reduction which helps stabilizing and improving parsing accuracy. Clustering describes the capacity of MoE models to give more credit to experts believed to be more accurate given an input. Although promising, this is difficult to achieve, especially without additional data. We design an experimental set-up to study the impact of these effects. Whereas averaging is always beneficial, clustering requires good initialization and stabilization techniques, but its advantages over mere averaging seem to eventually vanish when enough experts are present. As a by product, we show how this leads to state-of-the-art results on the PTB and the CoNLL09 Chinese treebank, with low variance across experiments.
Anthology ID:
2021.iwpt-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2021 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies (IWPT 2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Reut Tsarfaty, Gosse Bouma, Djamé Seddah, Daniel Zeman
Venue:
IWPT
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
106–118
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.iwpt-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.iwpt-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xudong Zhang, Joseph Le Roux, and Thierry Charnois. 2021. Strength in Numbers: Averaging and Clustering Effects in Mixture of Experts for Graph-Based Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2021 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies (IWPT 2021), pages 106–118, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Strength in Numbers: Averaging and Clustering Effects in Mixture of Experts for Graph-Based Dependency Parsing (Zhang et al., IWPT 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.iwpt-1.11.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.iwpt-1.11.mp4