Kelly Zhang


2018

Recently, researchers have found that deep LSTMs trained on tasks like machine translation learn substantial syntactic and semantic information about their input sentences, including part-of-speech. These findings begin to shed light on why pretrained representations, like ELMo and CoVe, are so beneficial for neural language understanding models. We still, though, do not yet have a clear understanding of how the choice of pretraining objective affects the type of linguistic information that models learn. With this in mind, we compare four objectives—language modeling, translation, skip-thought, and autoencoding—on their ability to induce syntactic and part-of-speech information, holding constant the quantity and genre of the training data, as well as the LSTM architecture.