VISPool: Enhancing Transformer Encoders with Vector Visibility Graph Neural Networks

Tuna Alikaşifoğlu, Arda Aras, Aykut Koc


Abstract
The emergence of transformers has revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), as evidenced in various NLP tasks. While graph neural networks (GNNs) show recent promise in NLP, they are not standalone replacements for transformers. Rather, recent research explores combining transformers and GNNs. Existing GNN-based approaches rely on static graph construction methods requiring excessive text processing, and most of them are not scalable with the increasing document and word counts. We address these limitations by proposing a novel dynamic graph construction method for text documents based on vector visibility graphs (VVGs) generated from transformer output. Then, we introduce visibility pooler (VISPool), a scalable model architecture that seamlessly integrates VVG convolutional networks into transformer pipelines. We evaluate the proposed model on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark datasets. VISPool outperforms the baselines with less trainable parameters, demonstrating the viability of the visibility-based graph construction method for enhancing transformers with GNNs.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.149
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2547–2556
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.149
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tuna Alikaşifoğlu, Arda Aras, and Aykut Koc. 2024. VISPool: Enhancing Transformer Encoders with Vector Visibility Graph Neural Networks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 2547–2556, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VISPool: Enhancing Transformer Encoders with Vector Visibility Graph Neural Networks (Alikaşifoğlu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.149.pdf