The new spacy pretrain command implemented BERT/ULMFit/etc-like transfer learning, using our Language Modelling with Approximate Outputs version of BERT's cloze task. Pretraining is convenient, but in some ways it's a bit of a strange solution. All we're doing is initialising the weights. At the same time, we're putting a lot of work into our optimisation so that it's less sensitive to initial conditions, and more likely to find good optima. I discuss this a bit in the pseudo-rehearsal blog post: https://explosion.ai/blog/pseudo-rehearsal-catastrophic-forgetting
Support semi-supervised learning in spacy train
One obvious way to improve these pretraining methods is to do multi-task learning, instead of just transfer learning. This has been shown to work very well: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.08370.pdf . This patch makes it easy to do this sort of thing.
Add a new argument to spacy train, --raw-text. This takes a jsonl file with unlabelled data that can be used in arbitrary ways to do semi-supervised learning.
Add a new method to the Language class and to pipeline components, .rehearse(). This is like .update(), but doesn't expect GoldParse objects. It takes a batch of Doc objects, and performs an update on some semi-supervised objective.
Move the BERT-LMAO objective out from spacy/cli/pretrain.py into spacy/_ml.py, so we can create a new pipeline component, ClozeMultitask. This can be specified as a parser or NER multitask in the spacy train command. Example usage:
python -m spacy train en ./tmp ~/data/en-core-web/train/nw.json ~/data/en-core-web/dev/nw.json --pipeline parser --raw-textt ~/data/unlabelled/reddit-100k.jsonl --vectors en_vectors_web_lg --parser-multitasks cloze
Implement rehearsal methods for pipeline components
The new --raw-text argument and nlp.rehearse() method also gives us a good place to implement the the idea in the pseudo-rehearsal blog post in the parser. This works as follows:
Add a new nlp.resume_training() method. This allocates copies of pre-trained models in the pipeline, setting things up for the rehearsal updates. It also returns an optimizer object. This also greatly reduces confusion around the nlp.begin_training() method, which randomises the weights, making it not suitable for adding new labels or otherwise fine-tuning a pre-trained model.
Implement rehearsal updates on the Parser class, making it available for the dependency parser and NER. During rehearsal, the initial model is used to supervise the model being trained. The current model is asked to match the predictions of the initial model on some data. This minimises catastrophic forgetting, by keeping the model's predictions close to the original. See the blog post for details.
Implement rehearsal updates for tagger
Implement rehearsal updates for text categoriz
* Work on refactoring greedy parser
* Compile updated parser
* Fix refactored parser
* Update test
* Fix refactored parser
* Fix refactored parser
* Readd beam search after refactor
* Fix beam search after refactor
* Fix parser
* Fix beam parsing
* Support oracle segmentation in ud-train CLI command
* Avoid relying on final gold check in beam search
* Add a keyword argument sink to GoldParse
* Bug fixes to beam search after refactor
* Avoid importing fused token symbol in ud-run-test, untl that's added
* Avoid importing fused token symbol in ud-run-test, untl that's added
* Don't modify Token in global scope
* Fix error in beam gradient calculation
* Default to beam_update_prob 1
* Set a more aggressive threshold on the max violn update
* Disable some tests to figure out why CI fails
* Disable some tests to figure out why CI fails
* Add some diagnostics to travis.yml to try to figure out why build fails
* Tell Thinc to link against system blas on Travis
* Point thinc to libblas on Travis
* Try running sudo=true for travis
* Unhack travis.sh
* Restore beam_density argument for parser beam
* Require thinc 6.11.1.dev16
* Revert hacks to tests
* Revert hacks to travis.yml
* Update thinc requirement
* Fix parser model loading
* Fix size limits in training data
* Add missing name attribute for parser
* Fix appveyor for Windows
Matthew Honnibal