We present, to our knowledge, the first application of BERT to document classification. A few characteristics of the task might lead one to think that BERT is not the most appropriate model: syntactic structures matter less for content categories, documents can often be longer than typical BERT input, and documents often have multiple labels. Nevertheless, we show that a straightforward classification model using BERT is able to achieve the state of the art across four popular datasets. To address the computational expense associated with BERT inference, we distill knowledge from BERT-large to small bidirectional LSTMs, reaching BERT-base parity on multiple datasets using 30x fewer parameters. The primary contribution of our paper is improved baselines that can provide the foundation for future work.
We report on a series of experiments with convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on top of pre-trained word vectors for sentence-level classification tasks. We show that a simple CNN with little hyperparameter tuning and static vectors achieves excellent results on multiple benchmarks. Learning task-specific vectors through fine-tuning offers further gains in performance. We additionally propose a simple modification to the architecture to allow for the use of both task-specific and static vectors. The CNN models discussed herein improve upon the state of the art on 4 out of 7 tasks, which include sentiment analysis and question classification.  Traditional approaches to the task of ACE event extraction primarily rely on elaborately designed features and complicated natural language processing (NLP) tools. These traditional approaches lack generalization, take a large amount of human effort and are prone to error propagation and data sparsity problems. This paper proposes a novel event-extraction method, which aims to automatically extract lexical-level and sentence-level features without using complicated NLP tools. We introduce a word-representation model to capture meaningful semantic regularities for words and adopt a framework based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) to capture sentence-level clues. However, CNN can only capture the most important information in a sentence and may miss valuable facts when considering multiple-event sentences. We propose a dynamic multi-pooling convolutional neural network (DMCNN), which uses a dynamic multi-pooling layer according to event triggers and arguments, to reserve more crucial information. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.