Transformer architectures show significant promise for natural language processing. Given that a single pretrained model can be fine-tuned to perform well on many different tasks, these networks appear to extract generally useful linguistic features. A natural question is how such networks represent this information internally. This paper describes qualitative and quantitative investigations of one particularly effective model, BERT. At a high level, linguistic features seem to be represented in separate semantic and syntactic subspaces. We find evidence of a fine-grained geometric representation of word senses. We also present empirical descriptions of syntactic representations in both attention matrices and individual word embeddings, as well as a mathematical argument to explain the geometry of these representations.
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to discriminate images from unseen classes by exploiting relations to seen classes via their semantic descriptions. Some recent papers have shown the importance of localized features together with fine-tuning the feature extractor to obtain discriminative and transferable features. However, these methods require complex attention or part detection modules to perform explicit localization in the visual space. In contrast, in this paper we propose localizing representations in the semantic/attribute space, with a simple but effective pipeline where localization is implicit. Focusing on attribute representations, we show that our method obtains state-of-the-art performance on CUB and SUN datasets, and also achieves competitive results on AWA2 dataset, outperforming generally more complex methods with explicit localization in the visual space. Our method can be implemented easily, which can be used as a new baseline for zero shot learning.
The advent of deep neural networks pre-trained via language modeling tasks has spurred a number of successful applications in natural language processing. This work explores one such popular model, BERT, in the context of document ranking. We propose two variants, called monoBERT and duoBERT, that formulate the ranking problem as pointwise and pairwise classification, respectively. These two models are arranged in a multi-stage ranking architecture to form an end-to-end search system. One major advantage of this design is the ability to trade off quality against latency by controlling the admission of candidates into each pipeline stage, and by doing so, we are able to find operating points that offer a good balance between these two competing metrics. On two large-scale datasets, MS MARCO and TREC CAR, experiments show that our model produces results that are either at or comparable to the state of the art. Ablation studies show the contributions of each component and characterize the latency/quality tradeoff space.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently become the primary choice for learning from graph-structured data, superseding hash fingerprints in representing chemical compounds. However, GCNs lack the ability to take into account the ordering of node neighbors, even when there is a geometric interpretation of the graph vertices that provides an order based on their spatial positions. To remedy this issue, we propose Geometric Graph Convolutional Network (geo-GCN) which uses spatial features to efficiently learn from graphs that can be naturally located in space. Our contribution is threefold: we propose a GCN-inspired architecture which (i) leverages node positions, (ii) is a proper generalisation of both GCNs and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), (iii) benefits from augmentation which further improves the performance and assures invariance with respect to the desired properties. Empirically, geo-GCN outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based methods on image classification and chemical tasks.
BERT-based architectures currently give state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, but little is known about the exact mechanisms that contribute to its success. In the current work, we focus on the interpretation of self-attention, which is one of the fundamental underlying components of BERT. Using a subset of GLUE tasks and a set of handcrafted features-of-interest, we propose the methodology and carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the information encoded by the individual BERT's heads. Our findings suggest that there is a limited set of attention patterns that are repeated across different heads, indicating the overall model overparametrization. While different heads consistently use the same attention patterns, they have varying impact on performance across different tasks. We show that manually disabling attention in certain heads leads to a performance improvement over the regular fine-tuned BERT models.
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) reach state-of-the-art results in a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, understanding of their internal functioning is still insufficient and unsatisfactory. In order to better understand BERT and other Transformer-based models, we present a layer-wise analysis of BERT's hidden states. Unlike previous research, which mainly focuses on explaining Transformer models by their attention weights, we argue that hidden states contain equally valuable information. Specifically, our analysis focuses on models fine-tuned on the task of Question Answering (QA) as an example of a complex downstream task. We inspect how QA models transform token vectors in order to find the correct answer. To this end, we apply a set of general and QA-specific probing tasks that reveal the information stored in each representation layer. Our qualitative analysis of hidden state visualizations provides additional insights into BERT's reasoning process. Our results show that the transformations within BERT go through phases that are related to traditional pipeline tasks. The system can therefore implicitly incorporate task-specific information into its token representations. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that fine-tuning has little impact on the models' semantic abilities and that prediction errors can be recognized in the vector representations of even early layers.
Knowledge graphs are important resources for many artificial intelligence tasks but often suffer from incompleteness. In this work, we propose to use pre-trained language models for knowledge graph completion. We treat triples in knowledge graphs as textual sequences and propose a novel framework named Knowledge Graph Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (KG-BERT) to model these triples. Our method takes entity and relation descriptions of a triple as input and computes scoring function of the triple with the KG-BERT language model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark knowledge graphs show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in triple classification, link prediction and relation prediction tasks.
The latest work on language representations carefully integrates contextualized features into language model training, which enables a series of success especially in various machine reading comprehension and natural language inference tasks. However, the existing language representation models including ELMo, GPT and BERT only exploit plain context-sensitive features such as character or word embeddings. They rarely consider incorporating structured semantic information which can provide rich semantics for language representation. To promote natural language understanding, we propose to incorporate explicit contextual semantics from pre-trained semantic role labeling, and introduce an improved language representation model, Semantics-aware BERT (SemBERT), which is capable of explicitly absorbing contextual semantics over a BERT backbone. SemBERT keeps the convenient usability of its BERT precursor in a light fine-tuning way without substantial task-specific modifications. Compared with BERT, semantics-aware BERT is as simple in concept but more powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art or substantially improves results on ten reading comprehension and language inference tasks.
Extreme multi-label text classification (XMC) aims to tag each input text with the most relevant labels from an extremely large label set, such as those that arise in product categorization and e-commerce recommendation. Recently, pretrained language representation models such as BERT achieve remarkable state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of NLP tasks including sentence classification among small label sets (typically fewer than thousands). Indeed, there are several challenges in applying BERT to the XMC problem. The main challenges are: (i) the difficulty of capturing dependencies and correlations among labels, whose features may come from heterogeneous sources, and (ii) the tractability to scale to the extreme label setting as the model size can be very large and scale linearly with the size of the output space. To overcome these challenges, we propose X-BERT, the first feasible attempt to finetune BERT models for a scalable solution to the XMC problem. Specifically, X-BERT leverages both the label and document text to build label representations, which induces semantic label clusters in order to better model label dependencies. At the heart of X-BERT is finetuning BERT models to capture the contextual relations between input text and the induced label clusters. Finally, an ensemble of the different BERT models trained on heterogeneous label clusters leads to our best final model. Empirically, on a Wiki dataset with around 0.5 million labels, X-BERT achieves new state-of-the-art results where the precision@1 reaches 67:80%, a substantial improvement over 32.58%/60.91% of deep learning baseline fastText and competing XMC approach Parabel, respectively. This amounts to a 11.31% relative improvement over Parabel, which is indeed significant since the recent approach SLICE only has 5.53% relative improvement.
Large pre-trained neural networks such as BERT have had great recent success in NLP, motivating a growing body of research investigating what aspects of language they are able to learn from unlabeled data. Most recent analysis has focused on model outputs (e.g., language model surprisal) or internal vector representations (e.g., probing classifiers). Complementary to these works, we propose methods for analyzing the attention mechanisms of pre-trained models and apply them to BERT. BERT's attention heads exhibit patterns such as attending to delimiter tokens, specific positional offsets, or broadly attending over the whole sentence, with heads in the same layer often exhibiting similar behaviors. We further show that certain attention heads correspond well to linguistic notions of syntax and coreference. For example, we find heads that attend to the direct objects of verbs, determiners of nouns, objects of prepositions, and coreferent mentions with remarkably high accuracy. Lastly, we propose an attention-based probing classifier and use it to further demonstrate that substantial syntactic information is captured in BERT's attention.
Clustering and classification critically rely on distance metrics that provide meaningful comparisons between data points. We present mixed-integer optimization approaches to find optimal distance metrics that generalize the Mahalanobis metric extensively studied in the literature. Additionally, we generalize and improve upon leading methods by removing reliance on pre-designated "target neighbors," "triplets," and "similarity pairs." Another salient feature of our method is its ability to enable active learning by recommending precise regions to sample after an optimal metric is computed to improve classification performance. This targeted acquisition can significantly reduce computational burden by ensuring training data completeness, representativeness, and economy. We demonstrate classification and computational performance of the algorithms through several simple and intuitive examples, followed by results on real image and medical datasets.