A Mutual Information Maximization Perspective of Language Representation Learning

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• Lingpeng Kong (DeepMind)
• Friday 01 November 2019, 12:00-13:00
• FW26, Computer Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact James Thorne.

In this talk, we show state-of-the-art word representation learning methods maximize an objective function that is a lower bound on the mutual information between different parts of a word sequence (i.e., a sentence). Our formulation provides an alternative perspective that unifies classical word embedding models (e.g., Skip-gram) and modern contextual embeddings (e.g., BERT , XLNet). In addition to enhancing our theoretical understanding of these methods, our derivation leads to a principled framework that can be used to construct new self-supervised tasks. We provide an example by drawing inspirations from related methods based on mutual information maximization that have been successful in computer vision, and introduce a simple self-supervised objective that maximizes the mutual information between a global sentence representation and n-grams in the sentence. Our analysis offers a holistic view of representation learning methods to transfer knowledge and translate progress across multiple domains (e.g., natural language processing, computer vision, audio processing).

This talk is part of the NLIP Seminar Series series.

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