No Arabic abstract
In this work we explore Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) of pretrained language models for downstream tasks. We introduce UDALM, a fine-tuning procedure, using a mixed classification and Masked Language Model loss, that can adapt to the target domain distribution in a robust and sample efficient manner. Our experiments show that performance of models trained with the mixed loss scales with the amount of available target data and the mixed loss can be effectively used as a stopping criterion during UDA training. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between A-distance and the target error and explore some limitations of the Domain Adversarial Training approach. Our method is evaluated on twelve domain pairs of the Amazon Reviews Sentiment dataset, yielding $91.74%$ accuracy, which is an $1.11%$ absolute improvement over the state-of-the-art.
This study tackles unsupervised domain adaptation of reading comprehension (UDARC). Reading comprehension (RC) is a task to learn the capability for question answering with textual sources. State-of-the-art models on RC still do not have general linguistic intelligence; i.e., their accuracy worsens for out-domain datasets that are not used in the training. We hypothesize that this discrepancy is caused by a lack of the language modeling (LM) capability for the out-domain. The UDARC task allows models to use supervised RC training data in the source domain and only unlabeled passages in the target domain. To solve the UDARC problem, we provide two domain adaptation models. The first one learns the out-domain LM and in-domain RC task sequentially. The second one is the proposed model that uses a multi-task learning approach of LM and RC. The models can retain both the RC capability acquired from the supervised data in the source domain and the LM capability from the unlabeled data in the target domain. We evaluated the models on UDARC with five datasets in different domains. The models outperformed the model without domain adaptation. In particular, the proposed model yielded an improvement of 4.3/4.2 points in EM/F1 in an unseen biomedical domain.
Recent work has shown the importance of adaptation of broad-coverage contextualised embedding models on the domain of the target task of interest. Current self-supervised adaptation methods are simplistic, as the training signal comes from a small percentage of emph{randomly} masked-out tokens. In this paper, we show that careful masking strategies can bridge the knowledge gap of masked language models (MLMs) about the domains more effectively by allocating self-supervision where it is needed. Furthermore, we propose an effective training strategy by adversarially masking out those tokens which are harder to reconstruct by the underlying MLM. The adversarial objective leads to a challenging combinatorial optimisation problem over emph{subsets} of tokens, which we tackle efficiently through relaxation to a variational lowerbound and dynamic programming. On six unsupervised domain adaptation tasks involving named entity recognition, our method strongly outperforms the random masking strategy and achieves up to +1.64 F1 score improvements.
Recent research indicates that pretraining cross-lingual language models on large-scale unlabeled texts yields significant performance improvements over various cross-lingual and low-resource tasks. Through training on one hundred languages and terabytes of texts, cross-lingual language models have proven to be effective in leveraging high-resource languages to enhance low-resource language processing and outperform monolingual models. In this paper, we further investigate the cross-lingual and cross-domain (CLCD) setting when a pretrained cross-lingual language model needs to adapt to new domains. Specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised feature decomposition method that can automatically extract domain-specific features and domain-invariant features from the entangled pretrained cross-lingual representations, given unlabeled raw texts in the source language. Our proposed model leverages mutual information estimation to decompose the representations computed by a cross-lingual model into domain-invariant and domain-specific parts. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art pretrained cross-lingual language model in the CLCD setting. The source code of this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/lijuntaopku/UFD.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) seeks to alleviate the problem of domain shift between the distribution of unlabeled data from the target domain w.r.t. labeled data from the source domain. While the single-target UDA scenario is well studied in the literature, Multi-Target Domain Adaptation (MTDA) remains largely unexplored despite its practical importance, e.g., in multi-camera video-surveillance applications. The MTDA problem can be addressed by adapting one specialized model per target domain, although this solution is too costly in many real-world applications. Blending multiple targets for MTDA has been proposed, yet this solution may lead to a reduction in model specificity and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised MTDA approach to train a CNN that can generalize well across multiple target domains. Our Multi-Teacher MTDA (MT-MTDA) method relies on multi-teacher knowledge distillation (KD) to iteratively distill target domain knowledge from multiple teachers to a common student. The KD process is performed in a progressive manner, where the student is trained by each teacher on how to perform UDA for a specific target, instead of directly learning domain adapted features. Finally, instead of combining the knowledge from each teacher, MT-MTDA alternates between teachers that distill knowledge, thereby preserving the specificity of each target (teacher) when learning to adapt to the student. MT-MTDA is compared against state-of-the-art methods on several challenging UDA benchmarks, and empirical results show that our proposed model can provide a considerably higher level of accuracy across multiple target domains. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LIVIAETS/MT-MTDA
The notion of in-domain data in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision -- suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and by precision and recall of sentence selection with respect to an oracle.