Pretrained Language Models for Sequential Sentence Classification

Arman Cohan, Iz Beltagy, Daniel King, Bhavana Dalvi, Dan Weld

Abstract
As a step toward better document-level understanding, we explore classification of a sequence of sentences into their corresponding categories, a task that requires understanding sentences in context of the document. Recent successful models for this task have used hierarchical models to contextualize sentence representations, and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to incorporate dependencies between subsequent labels. In this work, we show that pretrained language models, BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) in particular, can be used for this task to capture contextual dependencies without the need for hierarchical encoding nor a CRF. Specifically, we construct a joint sentence representation that allows BERT Transformer layers to directly utilize contextual information from all words in all sentences. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets, including a new dataset of structured scientific abstracts.
Anthology ID:
D19-1383
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3693–3699
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1383
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1383
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arman Cohan, Iz Beltagy, Daniel King, Bhavana Dalvi, and Dan Weld. 2019. Pretrained Language Models for Sequential Sentence Classification. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3693–3699, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pretrained Language Models for Sequential Sentence Classification (Cohan et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/D19-1383.pdf
Code
 allenai/sequential_sentence_classification
Data
CSAbstruct Dataset
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