Reporting Score Distributions Makes a Difference: Performance Study of LSTM-networks for Sequence Tagging

Nils Reimers, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
In this paper we show that reporting a single performance score is insufficient to compare non-deterministic approaches. We demonstrate for common sequence tagging tasks that the seed value for the random number generator can result in statistically significant (p < 10-4) differences for state-of-the-art systems. For two recent systems for NER, we observe an absolute difference of one percentage point F₁-score depending on the selected seed value, making these systems perceived either as state-of-the-art or mediocre. Instead of publishing and reporting single performance scores, we propose to compare score distributions based on multiple executions. Based on the evaluation of 50.000 LSTM-networks for five sequence tagging tasks, we present network architectures that produce both superior performance as well as are more stable with respect to the remaining hyperparameters.
Anthology ID:
D17-1035
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
338–348
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1035
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1035
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nils Reimers and Iryna Gurevych. 2017. Reporting Score Distributions Makes a Difference: Performance Study of LSTM-networks for Sequence Tagging. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 338–348, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reporting Score Distributions Makes a Difference: Performance Study of LSTM-networks for Sequence Tagging (Reimers & Gurevych, EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1035.pdf
Code
 UKPLab/emnlp2017-bilstm-cnn-crf +  additional community code
Data
Penn Treebank