Efficient Domain Adaptation of Sentence Embeddings Using Adapters

Tim Schopf, Dennis N. Schneider, Florian Matthes


Abstract
Sentence embeddings enable us to capture the semantic similarity of short texts. Most sentence embedding models are trained for general semantic textual similarity tasks. Therefore, to use sentence embeddings in a particular domain, the model must be adapted to it in order to achieve good results. Usually, this is done by fine-tuning the entire sentence embedding model for the domain of interest. While this approach yields state-of-the-art results, all of the model’s weights are updated during fine-tuning, making this method resource-intensive. Therefore, instead of fine-tuning entire sentence embedding models for each target domain individually, we propose to train lightweight adapters. These domain-specific adapters do not require fine-tuning all underlying sentence embedding model parameters. Instead, we only train a small number of additional parameters while keeping the weights of the underlying sentence embedding model fixed. Training domain-specific adapters allows always using the same base model and only exchanging the domain-specific adapters to adapt sentence embeddings to a specific domain. We show that using adapters for parameter-efficient domain adaptation of sentence embeddings yields competitive performance within 1% of a domain-adapted, entirely fine-tuned sentence embedding model while only training approximately 3.6% of the parameters.
Anthology ID:
2023.ranlp-1.112
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
1046–1053
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.112
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tim Schopf, Dennis N. Schneider, and Florian Matthes. 2023. Efficient Domain Adaptation of Sentence Embeddings Using Adapters. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 1046–1053, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Efficient Domain Adaptation of Sentence Embeddings Using Adapters (Schopf et al., RANLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.112.pdf