Empirical Evaluation of Pre-trained Transformers for Human-Level NLP: The Role of Sample Size and Dimensionality
Adithya V Ganesan, Matthew Matero, Aravind Reddy Ravula, Huy Vu, H. Andrew Schwartz
Abstract
In human-level NLP tasks, such as predicting mental health, personality, or demographics, the number of observations is often smaller than the standard 768+ hidden state sizes of each layer within modern transformer-based language models, limiting the ability to effectively leverage transformers. Here, we provide a systematic study on the role of dimension reduction methods (principal components analysis, factorization techniques, or multi-layer auto-encoders) as well as the dimensionality of embedding vectors and sample sizes as a function of predictive performance. We first find that fine-tuning large models with a limited amount of data pose a significant difficulty which can be overcome with a pre-trained dimension reduction regime. RoBERTa consistently achieves top performance in human-level tasks, with PCA giving benefit over other reduction methods in better handling users that write longer texts. Finally, we observe that a majority of the tasks achieve results comparable to the best performance with just 1/12 of the embedding dimensions.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.naacl-main.357
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4515–4532
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.357
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.357
- Cite (ACL):
- Adithya V Ganesan, Matthew Matero, Aravind Reddy Ravula, Huy Vu, and H. Andrew Schwartz. 2021. Empirical Evaluation of Pre-trained Transformers for Human-Level NLP: The Role of Sample Size and Dimensionality. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4515–4532, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Empirical Evaluation of Pre-trained Transformers for Human-Level NLP: The Role of Sample Size and Dimensionality (V Ganesan et al., NAACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2021.naacl-main.357.pdf
- Code
- adithya8/ContextualEmbeddingDR