Training Compact Models for Low Resource NLP tasks using transformer 

Training models on low-resource NLP tasks has been shown to be a challenge, especially in industrial applications where deploying updated models is a continuous effort and crucial for business operations. In such cases there is often an abundance of unlabeled data, while labeled data is scarce or unavailable. Pre-trained language models trained to extract contextual features from text were shown to improve many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including scarcely labeled tasks, by leveraging transfer learning. However, such models impose a heavy memory and computational burden, making it a challenge to train and deploy such models for inference use. In this session, Intel AI lab will demonstrate how to combine the effectiveness of transfer learning provided by pre-trained masked language models with a semi-supervised approach to train a fast and compact model using labeled and unlabeled examples. Preliminary evaluations show that the compact models can achieve competitive accuracy with 36x compression rate when compared with a state-of-the-art pre-trained language model, and run significantly faster in inference, allowing deployment of such models in production environments or on edge devices.

Mr. Moshe Wasserblat is currently Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL) research group manager at Intel's AI Product group. In his former role, he has been with NICE Systems for more than 17 years and has founded the NICE's Speech Analytics Research Team. His interests are in the field of Speech Processing and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He was the co-founder coordinator of EXCITEMENT FP7 ICT program and has filed more than 60 patents in the field of Language Technology and also has several publications in international conferences and journals.