An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Transfer Learning from Pretrained Language Models

Alexandra Chronopoulou, Christos Baziotis, Alexandros Potamianos


Abstract
A growing number of state-of-the-art transfer learning methods employ language models pretrained on large generic corpora. In this paper we present a conceptually simple and effective transfer learning approach that addresses the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, we combine the task-specific optimization function with an auxiliary language model objective, which is adjusted during the training process. This preserves language regularities captured by language models, while enabling sufficient adaptation for solving the target task. Our method does not require pretraining or finetuning separate components of the network and we train our models end-to-end in a single step. We present results on a variety of challenging affective and text classification tasks, surpassing well established transfer learning methods with greater level of complexity.
Anthology ID:
N19-1213
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2089–2095
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1213
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1213
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Christos Baziotis, and Alexandros Potamianos. 2019. An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Transfer Learning from Pretrained Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2089–2095, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Transfer Learning from Pretrained Language Models (Chronopoulou et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1213.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-1213.mp4
Code
 alexandra-chron/siatl