Papers › Optimizing Word Segmentation for Downstream Task

Optimizing Word Segmentation for Downstream Task

1 Nov 2020Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020archive 2025-07-28

Tatsuya Hiraoka, Sho Takase, Kei Uchiumi, Atsushi Keyaki, Naoaki Okazaki

In traditional NLP, we tokenize a given sentence as a preprocessing, and thus the tokenization is unrelated to a target downstream task. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to explore a tokenization which is appropriate for the downstream task. Our proposed method, optimizing tokenization (OpTok), is trained to assign a high probability to such appropriate tokenization based on the downstream task loss. OpTok can be used for any downstream task which uses a vector representation of a sentence such as text classification. Experimental results demonstrate that OpTok improves the performance of sentiment analysis and textual entailment. In addition, we introduce OpTok into BERT, the state-of-the-art contextualized embeddings and report a positive effect.

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Tasks

Natural Language InferenceSegmentationSentenceSentiment AnalysisText Classificationtext-classification

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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