Multi-Task Learning for Sequence Tagging: An Empirical Study

Soravit Changpinyo, Hexiang Hu, Fei Sha


Abstract
We study three general multi-task learning (MTL) approaches on 11 sequence tagging tasks. Our extensive empirical results show that in about 50% of the cases, jointly learning all 11 tasks improves upon either independent or pairwise learning of the tasks. We also show that pairwise MTL can inform us what tasks can benefit others or what tasks can be benefited if they are learned jointly. In particular, we identify tasks that can always benefit others as well as tasks that can always be harmed by others. Interestingly, one of our MTL approaches yields embeddings of the tasks that reveal the natural clustering of semantic and syntactic tasks. Our inquiries have opened the doors to further utilization of MTL in NLP.
Anthology ID:
C18-1251
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2965–2977
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1251
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Soravit Changpinyo, Hexiang Hu, and Fei Sha. 2018. Multi-Task Learning for Sequence Tagging: An Empirical Study. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2965–2977, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Task Learning for Sequence Tagging: An Empirical Study (Changpinyo et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1251.pdf
Data
CoNLL 2003English Web TreebankFrameNetSTREUSLEUniversal Dependencies