Fast-R2D2: A Pretrained Recursive Neural Network based on Pruned CKY for Grammar Induction and Text Representation

Xiang Hu, Haitao Mi, Liang Li, Gerard de Melo


Abstract
Chart-based models have shown great potential in unsupervised grammar induction, running recursively and hierarchically, but requiring O(n³) time-complexity. The Recursive Transformer based on Differentiable Trees (R2D2) makes it possible to scale to large language model pretraining even with a complex tree encoder, by introducing a heuristic pruning method.However, its rule-based pruning process suffers from local optima and slow inference. In this paper, we propose a unified R2D2 method that overcomes these issues. We use a top-down unsupervised parser as a model-guided pruning method, which also enables parallel encoding during inference. Our parser casts parsing as a split point scoring task by first scoring all split points for a given sentence and then using the highest-scoring one to recursively split a span into two parts. The reverse order of the splits is considered as the order of pruning in the encoder. We optimize the unsupervised parser by minimizing the Kullback–Leibler distance between tree probabilities from the parser and the R2D2 model.Our experiments show that our Fast-R2D2 significantly improves the grammar induction quality and achieves competitive results in downstream tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.181
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2809–2821
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.181
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.181
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Hu, Haitao Mi, Liang Li, and Gerard de Melo. 2022. Fast-R2D2: A Pretrained Recursive Neural Network based on Pruned CKY for Grammar Induction and Text Representation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2809–2821, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Fast-R2D2: A Pretrained Recursive Neural Network based on Pruned CKY for Grammar Induction and Text Representation (Hu et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.181.pdf