Papers by Brian Lester
SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models can be more efficient when they are larger than they are in their size. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based transfer learning approach called SPoT: Soft Prompt Transfer that learns a soft prompt on one or more source tasks and initializes it for a target task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms Prompt Tuning and MODELTUNING on superGLUE benchmarks while using up to 27,000 fewer task-specific parameters. |
Constrained Decoding for Computationally Efficient Named Entity Recognition Taggers (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition models use a conditional random field as the final layer . current work eschews prior knowledge of how the span encoding scheme works . |
| Approach: | They propose to constrain the output to suppress illegal transitions to train a tagger with a cross-entropy loss twice as fast as a CRF. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model trains twice as fast as a CRF with statistically insignificant differences in F1 . the proposed model is open source and can be used in PyTorch and TensorFlow. |
Intent Features for Rich Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | generic dialog systems, or chatbots, are increasingly popular, but most industrial dialog systems are built for specific clients and use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a new neural network architecture that allows for domain and topic agnostic properties of intents that can be learnt from syntactic cues only. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines for identifying intent features in a deployed, multi-intent natural language understanding module. |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | generative multilingual models fine-tuned on English forget to generate non-English data when labeled data is only available in English . generative models fine tuned on English fail to generate multilingual summarization tasks when labeling data is available in other languages . |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt tuning to overcome catastrophic forgetting in a generative task in . they assume a strict setting with no parallel data or machine translation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can overcome catastrophic forgetting to enable zero-shot cross-lingual generation. |
The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Unlike discrete text prompts used by GPT-3, soft prompts are learned through backpropagation and can be tuned to incorporate signals from any number of labeled examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism for learning "soft prompts" to condition frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fewshot learning using GPT-3 and matches the quality of model tuning as models exceed billions of parameters. |
An Effective Label Noise Model for DNN Text Classification (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train deep neural networks with label noise are limited to image classification models . label noise is important because of the large number of errors and errors in training datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose a non-linear processing layer that models label noise into a convolutional neural network (CNN) they add a noise model layer on top of their target model to account for label noise . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is robust to label noise and can learn better sentences . it is based on extensive experiments on text classification datasets . |