Analyzing Curriculum Learning for Sentiment Analysis along Task Difficulty, Pacing and Visualization Axes

Anvesh Rao Vijjini, Kaveri Anuranjana, Radhika Mamidi


Abstract
While Curriculum Learning (CL) has recently gained traction in Natural language Processing Tasks, it is still not adequately analyzed. Previous works only show their effectiveness but fail short to explain and interpret the internal workings fully. In this paper, we analyze curriculum learning in sentiment analysis along multiple axes. Some of these axes have been proposed by earlier works that need more in-depth study. Such analysis requires understanding where curriculum learning works and where it does not. Our axes of analysis include Task difficulty on CL, comparing CL pacing techniques, and qualitative analysis by visualizing the movement of attention scores in the model as curriculum phases progress. We find that curriculum learning works best for difficult tasks and may even lead to a decrement in performance for tasks with higher performance without curriculum learning. We see that One-Pass curriculum strategies suffer from catastrophic forgetting and attention movement visualization within curriculum pacing. This shows that curriculum learning breaks down the challenging main task into easier sub-tasks solved sequentially.
Anthology ID:
2021.wassa-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Orphee De Clercq, Alexandra Balahur, Joao Sedoc, Valentin Barriere, Shabnam Tafreshi, Sven Buechel, Veronique Hoste
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
117–128
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.13
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anvesh Rao Vijjini, Kaveri Anuranjana, and Radhika Mamidi. 2021. Analyzing Curriculum Learning for Sentiment Analysis along Task Difficulty, Pacing and Visualization Axes. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 117–128, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing Curriculum Learning for Sentiment Analysis along Task Difficulty, Pacing and Visualization Axes (Rao Vijjini et al., WASSA 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.13.pdf
Data
CIFAR-10CIFAR-100GLUESSTSST-2SST-5