Jingyuan Sun


2020

pdf bib
Distill and Replay for Continual Language Learning
Jingyuan Sun | Shaonan Wang | Jiajun Zhang | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Accumulating knowledge to tackle new tasks without necessarily forgetting the old ones is a hallmark of human-like intelligence. But the current dominant paradigm of machine learning is still to train a model that works well on static datasets. When learning tasks in a stream where data distribution may fluctuate, fitting on new tasks often leads to forgetting on the previous ones. We propose a simple yet effective framework that continually learns natural language understanding tasks with one model. Our framework distills knowledge and replays experience from previous tasks when fitting on a new task, thus named DnR (distill and replay). The framework is based on language models and can be smoothly built with different language model architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that DnR outperfoms previous state-of-the-art models in continually learning tasks of the same type but from different domains, as well as tasks of different types. With the distillation method, we further show that it’s possible for DnR to incrementally compress the model size while still outperforming most of the baselines. We hope that DnR could promote the empirical application of continual language learning, and contribute to building human-level language intelligence minimally bothered by catastrophic forgetting.

2018

pdf bib
Memory, Show the Way: Memory Based Few Shot Word Representation Learning
Jingyuan Sun | Shaonan Wang | Chengqing Zong
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) generally require sufficient examples for a word to learn a high quality representation. This is in stark contrast with human who can guess the meaning of a word from one or a few referents only. In this paper, we propose Mem2Vec, a memory based embedding learning method capable of acquiring high quality word representations from fairly limited context. Our method directly adapts the representations produced by a DSM with a longterm memory to guide its guess of a novel word. Based on a pre-trained embedding space, the proposed method delivers impressive performance on two challenging few-shot word similarity tasks. Embeddings learned with our method also lead to considerable improvements over strong baselines on NER and sentiment classification.