Modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) makes intensive use of deep learning methods because of the accuracy they offer for a variety of applications. Due to the significant environmental impact of deep learning, cost-benefit analysis including carb
on footprint as well as accuracy measures has been suggested to better document the use of NLP methods for research or deployment. In this paper, we review the tools that are available to measure energy use and CO2 emissions of NLP methods. We describe the scope of the measures provided and compare the use of six tools (carbon tracker, experiment impact tracker, green algorithms, ML CO2 impact, energy usage and cumulator) on named entity recognition experiments performed on different computational set-ups (local server vs. computing facility). Based on these findings, we propose actionable recommendations to accurately measure the environmental impact of NLP experiments.
Abstract This study carries out a systematic intrinsic evaluation of the semantic representations learned by state-of-the-art pre-trained multimodal Transformers. These representations are claimed to be task-agnostic and shown to help on many downstr
eam language-and-vision tasks. However, the extent to which they align with human semantic intuitions remains unclear. We experiment with various models and obtain static word representations from the contextualized ones they learn. We then evaluate them against the semantic judgments provided by human speakers. In line with previous evidence, we observe a generalized advantage of multimodal representations over language- only ones on concrete word pairs, but not on abstract ones. On the one hand, this confirms the effectiveness of these models to align language and vision, which results in better semantic representations for concepts that are grounded in images. On the other hand, models are shown to follow different representation learning patterns, which sheds some light on how and when they perform multimodal integration.
