Teaching machines to understand human language is one of the most elusive and long-standing challenges in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Driven by the fast development of deep learning, state-of-the-art NLP models have already achieved human-level performance in various large benchmark datasets, such as SQuAD, SNLI, and RACE. However, when these strong models are deployed to real-world applications, they often show poor generalization capability in two situations: 1. There is only a limited amount of data available for model training; 2. Deployed models may degrade significantly in performance on noisy test data or natural/artificial adversaries. In short, performance degradation on low-resource tasks/datasets and unseen data with distribution shifts imposes great challenges to the reliability of NLP models and prevent them from being massively applied in the wild. This dissertation aims to address these two issues. Towards the first one, we resort to transfer learning to leverage knowledge acquired from related data in order to improve performance on a target low-resource task/dataset. Specifically, we propose different transfer learning methods for three natural language understanding tasks: multi-choice question answering, dialogue state tracking, and sequence labeling, and one natural language generation task: machine translation. These methods are based on four basic transfer learning modalities: multi-task learning, sequential transfer learning, domain adaptation, and cross-lingual transfer. We show experimental results to validate that transferring knowledge from related domains, tasks, and languages can improve the target task/dataset significantly. For the second issue, we propose methods to evaluate the robustness of NLP models on text classification and entailment tasks. On one hand, we reveal that although these models can achieve a high accuracy of over 90%, they still easily crash over paraphrases of original samples by changing only around 10% words to their synonyms. On the other hand, by creating a new challenge set using four adversarial strategies, we find even the best models for the aspect-based sentiment analysis task cannot reliably identify the target aspect and recognize its sentiment accordingly. On the contrary, they are easily confused by distractor aspects. Overall, these findings raise great concerns of robustness of NLP models, which should be enhanced to ensure their long-run stable service.

Build custom NLP models in record time by adapting pre-trained machine learning models to solve specialized problems. Summary In Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing you will learn: Fine tuning pretrained models with new domain data Picking the right model to reduce resource usage Transfer learning for neural network architectures Generating text with generative pretrained transformers Cross-lingual transfer learning with BERT Foundations for exploring NLP academic literature Training deep learning NLP models from scratch is costly, time-consuming, and requires massive amounts of data. In Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing, DARPA researcher Paul Azunre reveals cutting-edge transfer learning techniques that apply customizable pretrained models to your own NLP architectures. You’ll learn how to use transfer learning to deliver state-of-the-art results for language comprehension, even when working with limited label data. Best of all, you’ll save on training time and computational costs. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Build custom NLP models in record time, even with limited datasets! Transfer learning is a machine learning technique for adapting pretrained machine learning models to solve specialized problems. This powerful approach has revolutionized natural language processing, driving improvements in machine translation, business analytics, and natural language generation. About the book Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing teaches you to create powerful NLP solutions quickly by building on existing pretrained models. This instantly useful book provides crystal-clear explanations of the concepts you need to grok transfer learning along with hands-on examples so you can practice your new skills immediately. As you go, you’ll apply state-of-the-art transfer learning methods to create a spam email classifier, a fact checker, and more real-world applications. What's inside Fine tuning pretrained models with new domain data Picking the right model to reduce resource use Transfer learning for neural network architectures Generating text with pretrained transformers About the reader For machine learning engineers and data scientists with some experience in NLP. About the author Paul Azunre holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and has served as a Principal Investigator on several DARPA research programs. Table of Contents PART 1 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW 1 What is transfer learning? 2 Getting started with baselines: Data preprocessing 3 Getting started with baselines: Benchmarking and optimization PART 2 SHALLOW TRANSFER LEARNING AND DEEP TRANSFER LEARNING WITH RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS (RNNS) 4 Shallow transfer learning for NLP 5 Preprocessing data for recurrent neural network deep transfer learning experiments 6 Deep transfer learning for NLP with recurrent neural networks PART 3 DEEP TRANSFER LEARNING WITH TRANSFORMERS AND ADAPTATION STRATEGIES 7 Deep transfer learning for NLP with the transformer and GPT 8 Deep transfer learning for NLP with BERT and multilingual BERT 9 ULMFiT and knowledge distillation adaptation strategies 10 ALBERT, adapters, and multitask adaptation strategies 11 Conclusions

Transfer learning is one of the most important technologies in the era of artificial intelligence and deep learning. It seeks to leverage existing knowledge by transferring it to another, new domain. Over the years, a number of relevant topics have attracted the interest of the research and application community: transfer learning, pre-training and fine-tuning, domain adaptation, domain generalization, and meta-learning. This book offers a comprehensive tutorial on an overview of transfer learning, introducing new researchers in this area to both classic and more recent algorithms. Most importantly, it takes a “student’s” perspective to introduce all the concepts, theories, algorithms, and applications, allowing readers to quickly and easily enter this area. Accompanying the book, detailed code implementations are provided to better illustrate the core ideas of several important algorithms, presenting good examples for practice.

Humans do a great job of reading text, identifying key ideas, summarizing, making connections, and other tasks that require comprehension and context. Recent advances in deep learning make it possible for computer systems to achieve similar results. Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing teaches you to apply deep learning methods to natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and use text effectively. In this insightful book, NLP expert Stephan Raaijmakers distills his extensive knowledge of the latest state-of-the-art developments in this rapidly emerging field. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

Information in today’s advancing world is rapidly expanding and becoming widely available. This eruption of data has made handling it a daunting and time-consuming task. Natural language processing (NLP) is a method that applies linguistics and algorithms to large amounts of this data to make it more valuable. NLP improves the interaction between humans and computers, yet there remains a lack of research that focuses on the practical implementations of this trending approach. Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of linguistic information processing and its computational properties. This publication will support readers with performing sentence classification and language generation using neural networks, apply deep learning models to solve machine translation and conversation problems, and apply deep structured semantic models on information retrieval and natural language applications. While highlighting topics including deep learning, query entity recognition, and information retrieval, this book is ideally designed for research and development professionals, IT specialists, industrialists, technology developers, data analysts, data scientists, academics, researchers, and students seeking current research on the fundamental concepts and techniques of natural language processing.

In recent years, deep learning has fundamentally changed the landscapes of a number of areas in artificial intelligence, including speech, vision, natural language, robotics, and game playing. In particular, the striking success of deep learning in a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications has served as a benchmark for the advances in one of the most important tasks in artificial intelligence. This book reviews the state of the art of deep learning research and its successful applications to major NLP tasks, including speech recognition and understanding, dialogue systems, lexical analysis, parsing, knowledge graphs, machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, social computing, and natural language generation from images. Outlining and analyzing various research frontiers of NLP in the deep learning era, it features self-contained, comprehensive chapters written by leading researchers in the field. A glossary of technical terms and commonly used acronyms in the intersection of deep learning and NLP is also provided. The book appeals to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, lecturers and industrial researchers, as well as anyone interested in deep learning and natural language processing.

Transfer learning deals with how systems can quickly adapt themselves to new situations, tasks and environments. It gives machine learning systems the ability to leverage auxiliary data and models to help solve target problems when there is only a small amount of data available. This makes such systems more reliable and robust, keeping the machine learning model faced with unforeseeable changes from deviating too much from expected performance. At an enterprise level, transfer learning allows knowledge to be reused so experience gained once can be repeatedly applied to the real world. For example, a pre-trained model that takes account of user privacy can be downloaded and adapted at the edge of a computer network. This self-contained, comprehensive reference text describes the standard algorithms and demonstrates how these are used in different transfer learning paradigms. It offers a solid grounding for newcomers as well as new insights for seasoned researchers and developers.