Ceyda Cinarel


2019

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Delta-training: Simple Semi-Supervised Text Classification using Pretrained Word Embeddings
Hwiyeol Jo | Ceyda Cinarel
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We propose a novel and simple method for semi-supervised text classification. The method stems from the hypothesis that a classifier with pretrained word embeddings always outperforms the same classifier with randomly initialized word embeddings, as empirically observed in NLP tasks. Our method first builds two sets of classifiers as a form of model ensemble, and then initializes their word embeddings differently: one using random, the other using pretrained word embeddings. We focus on different predictions between the two classifiers on unlabeled data while following the self-training framework. We also use early-stopping in meta-epoch to improve the performance of our method. Our method, Delta-training, outperforms the self-training and the co-training framework in 4 different text classification datasets, showing robustness against error accumulation.
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