Papers › Automated Concatenation of Embeddings for Structured Prediction

Automated Concatenation of Embeddings for Structured Prediction

10 Oct 2020ACL 2021 5arXiv:2010.05006archive 2025-07-28

Xinyu Wang, Yong Jiang, Nguyen Bach, Tao Wang, Zhongqiang Huang, Fei Huang, Kewei Tu

Pretrained contextualized embeddings are powerful word representations for structured prediction tasks. Recent work found that better word representations can be obtained by concatenating different types of embeddings. However, the selection of embeddings to form the best concatenated representation usually varies depending on the task and the collection of candidate embeddings, and the ever-increasing number of embedding types makes it a more difficult problem. In this paper, we propose Automated Concatenation of Embeddings (ACE) to automate the process of finding better concatenations of embeddings for structured prediction tasks, based on a formulation inspired by recent progress on neural architecture search. Specifically, a controller alternately samples a concatenation of embeddings, according to its current belief of the effectiveness of individual embedding types in consideration for a task, and updates the belief based on a reward. We follow strategies in reinforcement learning to optimize the parameters of the controller and compute the reward based on the accuracy of a task model, which is fed with the sampled concatenation as input and trained on a task dataset. Empirical results on 6 tasks and 21 datasets show that our approach outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance with fine-tuned embeddings in all the evaluations.

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Code

Alibaba-NLP/ACE officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
zhaoyuesun/phee mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Aspect ExtractionChunkingDependency ParsingNamed Entity Recognition (NER)Neural Architecture SearchPart-Of-Speech TaggingPredictionSemantic Dependency ParsingStructured Prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Aspect Extraction SemEval 2015 Task 12 ACE Restaurant (F1) 80.3 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect Extraction SemEval-2014 Task-4 ACE Laptop (F1) 87.4 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Aspect Extraction SemEval-2014 Task-4 ACE Restaurant (F1) 92.0 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Chunking CoNLL 2000 ACE Exact Span F1 97.3 #1 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Chunking CoNLL 2003 (English) ACE F1 92.5 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Chunking CoNLL 2003 (German) ACE F1 95.0 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Chunking Penn Treebank ACE F1 score 97.3 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Dependency Parsing Penn Treebank ACE LAS 95.8 #3 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Dependency Parsing Penn Treebank ACE UAS 97.2 #3 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2002 (Dutch) ACE + document-context F1 95.7 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2002 (Dutch) ACE F1 94.6 #3 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2002 (Spanish) ACE + document-context F1 95.9 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2002 (Spanish) ACE F1 91.7 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2003 (English) ACE + document-context F1 94.6 #1 of 73 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2003 (English) ACE F1 93.64 #16 of 73 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2003 (German) ACE + document-context F1 88.38 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2003 (German) ACE F1 87.0 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2003 (German) Revised ACE + document-context F1 91.7 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Named Entity Recognition (NER) CoNLL 2003 (German) Revised ACE F1 90.5 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Part-Of-Speech Tagging ARK ACE Acc 94.4 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Part-Of-Speech Tagging Ritter ACE Acc 93.4 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Part-Of-Speech Tagging Tweebank ACE Acc 95.8 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Dependency Parsing DM ACE In-domain 95.6 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Dependency Parsing DM ACE Out-of-domain 92.6 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Dependency Parsing PAS ACE In-domain 95.8 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Dependency Parsing PAS ACE Out-of-domain 94.6 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Dependency Parsing PSD ACE In-domain 83.8 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Dependency Parsing PSD ACE Out-of-domain 83.4 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECRFDense ConnectionsDropoutEntropy RegularizationLSTMLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionNeural Architecture SearchPPOResidual ConnectionSentencePieceSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxTanh ActivationWeight DecayWordPieceXLNet

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