Xiaoqin Chang


2022

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One-Teacher and Multiple-Student Knowledge Distillation on Sentiment Classification
Xiaoqin Chang | Sophia Yat Mei Lee | Suyang Zhu | Shoushan Li | Guodong Zhou
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Knowledge distillation is an effective method to transfer knowledge from a large pre-trained teacher model to a compacted student model. However, in previous studies, the distilled student models are still large and remain impractical in highly speed-sensitive systems (e.g., an IR system). In this study, we aim to distill a deep pre-trained model into an extremely compacted shallow model like CNN. Specifically, we propose a novel one-teacher and multiple-student knowledge distillation approach to distill a deep pre-trained teacher model into multiple shallow student models with ensemble learning. Moreover, we leverage large-scale unlabeled data to improve the performance of students. Empirical studies on three sentiment classification tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves better results with much fewer parameters (0.9%-18%) and extremely high speedup ratios (100X-1000X).