Compression in Sequence to Sequence Learning for Natural Language Processing
In this work, we propose a near lossless method for encoding long sequences of texts as well as all of their sub-sequences into feature rich representations. We test our method on sentiment analysis and show good performance across all sub-sentence and sentence embeddings. This work also demonstrates the use of knowledge distillation and quantization to compress the original Transformer model [Vaswani et al., 2017] for the translation task. We are, to the best of our knowledge, the first to show that 8-bit quantization of the weights of the Transformer can achieve the same BLEU score as the full-precision model. Furthermore, when we combine knowledge distillation with weight quantization, we can train smaller Transformer networks and achieve up to 12.59x compression while losing only 2.51 BLEU off the baseline on the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task. Chapter 1 introduces machine learning concepts for natural language processing which are essential to understanding both papers presented in this thesis. Chapter 2 and 3 cover each paper respectively, before finally concluding with chapter 4.
compression machine learning deep learning natural language processing sequence to sequence