Strong Baselines for Neural Semi-Supervised Learning under Domain Shift

Sebastian Ruder, Barbara Plank


Abstract
Novel neural models have been proposed in recent years for learning under domain shift. Most models, however, only evaluate on a single task, on proprietary datasets, or compare to weak baselines, which makes comparison of models difficult. In this paper, we re-evaluate classic general-purpose bootstrapping approaches in the context of neural networks under domain shifts vs. recent neural approaches and propose a novel multi-task tri-training method that reduces the time and space complexity of classic tri-training. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks for part-of-speech tagging and sentiment analysis are negative: while our novel method establishes a new state-of-the-art for sentiment analysis, it does not fare consistently the best. More importantly, we arrive at the somewhat surprising conclusion that classic tri-training, with some additions, outperforms the state-of-the-art for NLP. Hence classic approaches constitute an important and strong baseline.
Anthology ID:
P18-1096
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1044–1054
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1096
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1096
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Ruder and Barbara Plank. 2018. Strong Baselines for Neural Semi-Supervised Learning under Domain Shift. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1044–1054, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Strong Baselines for Neural Semi-Supervised Learning under Domain Shift (Ruder & Plank, ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1096.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-1096.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P18-1096.mp4
Code
 bplank/semi-supervised-baselines +  additional community code
Data
Multi-Domain Sentiment