We present paired learning and inference algorithms for significantly reducing computation and increasing speed of the vector dot products in the classifiers that are at the heart of many NLP components. This is accomplished by partitioning the features into a sequence of templates which are ordered such that high confidence can often be reached using only a small fraction of all features. Parameter estimation is arranged to maximize accuracy and early confidence in this sequence. Our approach is simpler and better suited to NLP than other related cascade methods. We present experiments in left-to-right part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and transition-based dependency parsing. On the typical benchmarking datasets we can preserve POS tagging accuracy above 97 and parsing LAS above 88.5 both with over a five-fold reduction in run-time, and NER F1 above 88 with more than 2x increase in speed.
Our work is also related to the field of learning and inference under test-time budget constraints @cite_7 @cite_14 . However, common approaches to this problem also employ auxiliary models to rank which feature to add next, and are generally suited for problems where features are expensive to compute ( e.g vision) and the extra computation of an auxiliary pruning-decision model is offset by substantial reduction in feature computations @cite_18 . Our method uses confidence scores directly from the model, and so requires no additional computation, making it suitable for speeding up classifier-based NLP methods that are already very fast and have relatively cheap features.
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_7
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Discriminative methods for learning structured models have enabled wide-spread use of very rich feature representations. However, the computational cost of feature extraction is prohibitive for large-scale or time-sensitive applications, often dominating the cost of inference in the models. Significant efforts have been devoted to sparsity-based model selection to decrease this cost. Such feature selection methods control computation statically and miss the opportunity to fine-tune feature extraction to each input at run-time. We address the key challenge of learning to control fine-grained feature extraction adaptively, exploiting non-homogeneity of the data. We propose an architecture that uses a rich feedback loop between extraction and prediction. The run-time control policy is learned using efficient value-function approximation, which adaptively determines the value of information of features at the level of individual variables for each input. We demonstrate significant speedups over state-of-the-art methods on two challenging datasets. For articulated pose estimation in video, we achieve a more accurate state-of-the-art model that is also faster, with similar results on an OCR task. In this paper we develop a framework for a sequential decision making under budget constraints for multi-class classification. In many classification systems, such as medical diagnosis and homeland security, sequential decisions are often warranted. For each instance, a sensor is first chosen for acquiring measurements and then based on the available information one decides (rejects) to seek more measurements from a new sensor modality or to terminate by classifying the example based on the available information. Different sensors have varying costs for acquisition, and these costs account for delay, throughput or monetary value. Consequently, we seek methods for maximizing performance of the system subject to budget constraints. We formulate a multi-stage multi-class empirical risk objective and learn sequential decision functions from training data. We show that reject decision at each stage can be posed as supervised binary classification. We derive bounds for the VC dimension of the multi-stage system to quantify the generalization error. We compare our approach to alternative strategies on several multi-class real world datasets. We present SpeedBoost, a natural extension of functional gradient descent, for learning anytime predictors, which automatically trade computation time for predictive accuracy by selecting from a set of simpler candidate predictors. These anytime predictors not only generate approximate predictions rapidly, but are capable of using extra resources at prediction time, when available, to improve performance. We also demonstrate how our framework can be used to select weak predictors which target certain subsets of the data, allowing for ecient use of computational resources on dicult examples. We also show that variants of the SpeedBoost algorithm produce predictors which are provably competitive with any possible sequence of weak predictors with the same total complexity.