In this paper, we consider the problem of sparsifying BERT models, which are a key building block for natural language processing, in order to reduce their storage and computational cost. We introduce the Optimal BERT Surgeon (oBERT), an efficient and accurate pruning method based on approximate second-order information, which we show to yield state-of-the-art results in both stages of language tasks: pre-training and fine-tuning. Specifically, oBERT extends existing work on second-order pruning by allowing for pruning weight blocks, and is the first such method that is applicable at BERT scale. Second, we investigate compounding compression approaches to obtain highly compressed but accurate models for deployment on edge devices. These models significantly push boundaries of the current state-of-the-art sparse BERT models with respect to all metrics: model size, inference speed and task accuracy. For example, relative to the dense BERT-base, we obtain 10x model size compression with < 1% accuracy drop, 10x CPU-inference speedup with < 2% accuracy drop, and 29x CPU-inference speedup with < 7.5% accuracy drop. Our code, fully integrated with Transformers and SparseML, is available at https://github.com/neuralmagic/sparseml/tree/main/research/optimal_BERT_surgeon_oBERT.

In this paper, we introduce XGLUE, a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora, and evaluate their performance across a diverse set of cross-lingual tasks. Comparing to GLUE (Wang et al.,2019), which is labeled in English and includes natural language understanding tasks only, XGLUE has three main advantages: (1) it provides two corpora with different sizes for cross-lingual pre-training; (2) it provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both natural language understanding and generation scenarios; (3) for each task, it provides labeled data in multiple languages. We extend a recent cross-lingual pre-trained model Unicoder (Huang et al., 2019) to cover both understanding and generation tasks, which is evaluated on XGLUE as a strong baseline. We also evaluate the base versions (12-layer) of Multilingual BERT, XLM and XLM-R for comparison.

This paper studies keyphrase extraction in real-world scenarios where documents are from diverse domains and have variant content quality. We curate and release OpenKP, a large scale open domain keyphrase extraction dataset with near one hundred thousand web documents and expert keyphrase annotations. To handle the variations of domain and content quality, we develop BLING-KPE, a neural keyphrase extraction model that goes beyond language understanding using visual presentations of documents and weak supervision from search queries. Experimental results on OpenKP confirm the effectiveness of BLING-KPE and the contributions of its neural architecture, visual features, and search log weak supervision. Zero-shot evaluations on DUC-2001 demonstrate the improved generalization ability of learning from the open domain data compared to a specific domain.