Richard Socher (Salesforce)

Richard is Chief Scientist at Salesforce, which he joined through acquisition of his startup Metamind. Previously, Richard was a professor in the Stanford CS department.
decaNLP - A Benchmark for Generalized NLP

Why Unified Multi-Task Models for NLP?

  • Multi-task learning is a blocker for general NLLP systems.
  • Unified models can decide how to transfer knowledge (domain adaptation, weight sharing, transfer learning, and zero-shot learning).
  • Unified AND multi-task models can:
    • More easily adapt to new tasks.
    • Make deploying to production X times simpler.
    • Lower the bar for more people to solve new tasks.
    • Potentially move towards continual learning.

The 3 Major NLP Task Categories

  1. 1.
    Sequence tagging: named entity recognition, aspect specific sentiment.
  2. 2.
    Text classification: dialogue state tracking, sentiment classification.
  3. 3.
    Sequence-to-sequence: machine translation, summarization, question answering.
⇒ They correspond to the 3 equivalent super-tasks of NLP: Language Modeling, Question Answering, and Dialogue.

A Multi-Task Question Answering Network for decaNLP

Methodology

  • Start with a context.
  • Ask a question.
  • Generate the answer one word at a time by:
    • Pointing to context.
    • Pointing to question.
    • Or choosing a word from an external vocabulary.
  • Pointer Switch is choosing between those three options for each output word.

Architecture Design

Multi-Task Question Answering Network Architecture
  • Train a single question answering model for multiple NLP tasks (aka questions).
  • Framework for tackling:
    • More general language understanding.
    • Multi-task learning.
    • Domain adaptation.
    • Transfer learning.
    • Weight-sharing, pre-training, fine-tuning.
    • Zero-shot learning.