Recent research efforts have shown that neural architectures can be effective in conventional information extraction tasks such as named entity recognition, yielding state-of-the-art results on standard newswire datasets. However, despite significant resources required for training such models, the performance of a model trained on one domain typically degrades dramatically when applied to a different domain, yet extracting entities from new emerging domains such as social media can be of significant interest. In this paper, we empirically investigate effective methods for conveniently adapting an existing, well-trained neural NER model for a new domain. Unlike existing approaches, we propose lightweight yet effective methods for performing domain adaptation for neural models. Specifically, we introduce adaptation layers on top of existing neural architectures, where no re-training using the source domain data is required. We conduct extensive empirical studies and show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
A major assumption in many machine learning and data mining algorithms is that the training and future data must be in the same feature space and have the same distribution. However, in many real-world applications, this assumption may not hold. For example, we sometimes have a classification task in one domain of interest, but we only have sufficient training data in another domain of interest, where the latter data may be in a different feature space or follow a different data distribution. In such cases, knowledge transfer, if done successfully, would greatly improve the performance of learning by avoiding much expensive data-labeling efforts. In recent years, transfer learning has emerged as a new learning framework to address this problem. This survey focuses on categorizing and reviewing the current progress on transfer learning for classification, regression, and clustering problems. In this survey, we discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other related machine learning techniques such as domain adaptation, multitask learning and sample selection bias, as well as covariate shift. We also explore some potential future issues in transfer learning research. Domain adaptation is an important problem in natural language processing (NLP) due to the lack of labeled data in novel domains. In this paper, we study the domain adaptation problem from the instance weighting perspective. We formally analyze and characterize the domain adaptation problem from a distributional view, and show that there are two distinct needs for adaptation, corresponding to the different distributions of instances and classification functions in the source and the target domains. We then propose a general instance weighting framework for domain adaptation. Our empirical results on three NLP tasks show that incorporating and exploiting more information from the target domain through instance weighting is effective. Discriminative learning methods are widely used in natural language processing. These methods work best when their training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. For many NLP tasks, however, we are confronted with new domains in which labeled data is scarce or non-existent. In such cases, we seek to adapt existing models from a resource-rich source domain to a resource-poor target domain. We introduce structural correspondence learning to automatically induce correspondences among features from different domains. We test our technique on part of speech tagging and show performance gains for varying amounts of source and target training data, as well as improvements in target domain parsing accuracy using our improved tagger. 