Martin Jaggi


2021

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Self-Supervised Neural Topic Modeling
Seyed Ali Bahrainian | Martin Jaggi | Carsten Eickhoff
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Topic models are useful tools for analyzing and interpreting the main underlying themes of large corpora of text. Most topic models rely on word co-occurrence for computing a topic, i.e., a weighted set of words that together represent a high-level semantic concept. In this paper, we propose a new light-weight Self-Supervised Neural Topic Model (SNTM) that learns a rich context by learning a topic representation jointly from three co-occurring words and a document that the triple originates from. Our experimental results indicate that our proposed neural topic model, SNTM, outperforms previously existing topic models in coherence metrics as well as document clustering accuracy. Moreover, apart from the topic coherence and clustering performance, the proposed neural topic model has a number of advantages, namely, being computationally efficient and easy to train.

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Lightweight Cross-Lingual Sentence Representation Learning
Zhuoyuan Mao | Prakhar Gupta | Chenhui Chu | Martin Jaggi | Sadao Kurohashi
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large-scale models for learning fixed-dimensional cross-lingual sentence representations like LASER (Artetxe and Schwenk, 2019b) lead to significant improvement in performance on downstream tasks. However, further increases and modifications based on such large-scale models are usually impractical due to memory limitations. In this work, we introduce a lightweight dual-transformer architecture with just 2 layers for generating memory-efficient cross-lingual sentence representations. We explore different training tasks and observe that current cross-lingual training tasks leave a lot to be desired for this shallow architecture. To ameliorate this, we propose a novel cross-lingual language model, which combines the existing single-word masked language model with the newly proposed cross-lingual token-level reconstruction task. We further augment the training task by the introduction of two computationally-lite sentence-level contrastive learning tasks to enhance the alignment of cross-lingual sentence representation space, which compensates for the learning bottleneck of the lightweight transformer for generative tasks. Our comparisons with competing models on cross-lingual sentence retrieval and multilingual document classification confirm the effectiveness of the newly proposed training tasks for a shallow model.

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Obtaining Better Static Word Embeddings Using Contextual Embedding Models
Prakhar Gupta | Martin Jaggi
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The advent of contextual word embeddings — representations of words which incorporate semantic and syntactic information from their context—has led to tremendous improvements on a wide variety of NLP tasks. However, recent contextual models have prohibitively high computational cost in many use-cases and are often hard to interpret. In this work, we demonstrate that our proposed distillation method, which is a simple extension of CBOW-based training, allows to significantly improve computational efficiency of NLP applications, while outperforming the quality of existing static embeddings trained from scratch as well as those distilled from previously proposed methods. As a side-effect, our approach also allows a fair comparison of both contextual and static embeddings via standard lexical evaluation tasks.

2020

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Masking as an Efficient Alternative to Finetuning for Pretrained Language Models
Mengjie Zhao | Tao Lin | Fei Mi | Martin Jaggi | Hinrich Schütze
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT on eleven diverse NLP tasks show that our masking scheme yields performance comparable to finetuning, yet has a much smaller memory footprint when several tasks need to be inferred. Intrinsic evaluations show that representations computed by our binary masked language models encode information necessary for solving downstream tasks. Analyzing the loss landscape, we show that masking and finetuning produce models that reside in minima that can be connected by a line segment with nearly constant test accuracy. This confirms that masking can be utilized as an efficient alternative to finetuning.

2019

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Correlating Twitter Language with Community-Level Health Outcomes
Arno Schneuwly | Ralf Grubenmann | Séverine Rion Logean | Mark Cieliebak | Martin Jaggi
Proceedings of the Fourth Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) Workshop & Shared Task

We study how language on social media is linked to mortal diseases such as atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD), diabetes and various types of cancer. Our proposed model leverages state-of-the-art sentence embeddings, followed by a regression model and clustering, without the need of additional labelled data. It allows to predict community-level medical outcomes from language, and thereby potentially translate these to the individual level. The method is applicable to a wide range of target variables and allows us to discover known and potentially novel correlations of medical outcomes with life-style aspects and other socioeconomic risk factors.

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Better Word Embeddings by Disentangling Contextual n-Gram Information
Prakhar Gupta | Matteo Pagliardini | Martin Jaggi
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Pre-trained word vectors are ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing applications. In this paper, we show how training word embeddings jointly with bigram and even trigram embeddings, results in improved unigram embeddings. We claim that training word embeddings along with higher n-gram embeddings helps in the removal of the contextual information from the unigrams, resulting in better stand-alone word embeddings. We empirically show the validity of our hypothesis by outperforming other competing word representation models by a significant margin on a wide variety of tasks. We make our models publicly available.

2018

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Unsupervised Learning of Sentence Embeddings Using Compositional n-Gram Features
Matteo Pagliardini | Prakhar Gupta | Martin Jaggi
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

The recent tremendous success of unsupervised word embeddings in a multitude of applications raises the obvious question if similar methods could be derived to improve embeddings (i.e. semantic representations) of word sequences as well. We present a simple but efficient unsupervised objective to train distributed representations of sentences. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised models on most benchmark tasks, highlighting the robustness of the produced general-purpose sentence embeddings.

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Simple Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction using Sentence Embeddings
Kamil Bennani-Smires | Claudiu Musat | Andreea Hossmann | Michael Baeriswyl | Martin Jaggi
Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Keyphrase extraction is the task of automatically selecting a small set of phrases that best describe a given free text document. Supervised keyphrase extraction requires large amounts of labeled training data and generalizes very poorly outside the domain of the training data. At the same time, unsupervised systems have poor accuracy, and often do not generalize well, as they require the input document to belong to a larger corpus also given as input. Addressing these drawbacks, in this paper, we tackle keyphrase extraction from single documents with EmbedRank: a novel unsupervised method, that leverages sentence embeddings. EmbedRank achieves higher F-scores than graph-based state of the art systems on standard datasets and is suitable for real-time processing of large amounts of Web data. With EmbedRank, we also explicitly increase coverage and diversity among the selected keyphrases by introducing an embedding-based maximal marginal relevance (MMR) for new phrases. A user study including over 200 votes showed that, although reducing the phrases’ semantic overlap leads to no gains in F-score, our high diversity selection is preferred by humans.

2017

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Generating Steganographic Text with LSTMs
Tina Fang | Martin Jaggi | Katerina Argyraki
Proceedings of ACL 2017, Student Research Workshop

2016

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SwissCheese at SemEval-2016 Task 4: Sentiment Classification Using an Ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks with Distant Supervision
Jan Deriu | Maurice Gonzenbach | Fatih Uzdilli | Aurelien Lucchi | Valeria De Luca | Martin Jaggi
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2015

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Swiss-Chocolate: Combining Flipout Regularization and Random Forests with Artificially Built Subsystems to Boost Text-Classification for Sentiment
Fatih Uzdilli | Martin Jaggi | Dominic Egger | Pascal Julmy | Leon Derczynski | Mark Cieliebak
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)

2014

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Swiss-Chocolate: Sentiment Detection using Sparse SVMs and Part-Of-Speech n-Grams
Martin Jaggi | Fatih Uzdilli | Mark Cieliebak
Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2014)