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Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research

An Evaluation of Progressive Neural Networks for Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing

Hagerer, Gerhard; Moeed, Abdul; Dugar, Sumit; Gupta, Sarthak; Ghosh, Mainak; Danner, Hannah; Mitevski, Oliver; Nawroth, Andreas; Groh, Georg (2020). An Evaluation of Progressive Neural Networks for Transfer Learning in Natural Language Processing, in: Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020) Marseille, 1376-1381.

A major challenge in modern neural networks is the utilization of previous knowledge for new tasks in an effective manner, otherwise known as transfer learning. Fine-tuning, the most widely used method for achieving this, suffers from catastrophic forgetting. The problem is often exacerbated in natural language processing (NLP). In this work, we assess progressive neural networks (PNNs) as an alternative to fine-tuning. The evaluation is based on common NLP tasks such as sequence labeling and text classification. By gauging PNNs across a range of architectures, datasets, and tasks, we observe improvements over the baselines throughout all experiments.

Conference Paper

Conference Volume

Event: 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, 2020-05-11