Pre-trained language models have shown great success in multiple downstream tasks. However, they are computationally expensive to fine-tune. Thus, transfer learning with adapter modules has been introduced to alleviate this problem, helping to extract knowledge of the downstream tasks. Adapterfusion models are an example of the transformers-with-adapter-modules, which merge multiple adapters to incorporate knowledge from different tasks. However, merging multiple adapters will inevitably cause redundancies, increasing the training and inference time massively. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an approach to identify the influence of each adapter module and a novel way to prune adapters based on the prestigious Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. Experiments on GLUE datasets show that the pruned Adapterfusion model with our scheme can achieve state-of-the-art results, reducing sizes significantly while keeping performance intact.

Graph-based Aspect-based Sentiment Classification (ABSC) approaches have yielded state-of-the-art results, expecially when equipped with contextual word embedding from pre-training language models (PLMs). However, they ignore sequential features of the context and have not yet made the best of PLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel model, BERT4GCN, which integrates the grammatical sequential features from the PLM of BERT, and the syntactic knowledge from dependency graphs. BERT4GCN utilizes outputs from intermediate layers of BERT and positional information between words to augment GCN (Graph Convolutional Network) to better encode the dependency graphs for the downstream classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BERT4GCN outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines, justifying that augmenting GCN with the grammatical features from intermediate layers of BERT can significantly empower ABSC models.