Unified Low-Resource Sequence Labeling by Sample-Aware Dynamic Sparse Finetuning

Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Peng Shi, Wenpeng Yin, Rui Zhang


Abstract
Unified Sequence Labeling that articulates different sequence labeling problems such as Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Semantic Role Labeling, etc. in a generalized sequence-to-sequence format opens up the opportunity to make the maximum utilization of large language model knowledge toward structured prediction. Unfortunately, this requires formatting them into specialized augmented format unknown to the base pretrained language model (PLMs) necessitating finetuning to the target format. This significantly bounds its usefulness in data-limited settings where finetuning large models cannot properly generalize to the target format. To address this challenge and leverage PLM knowledge effectively, we propose FISH-DIP, a sample-aware dynamic sparse finetuning strategy that selectively focuses on a fraction of parameters, informed by feedback from highly regressing examples, during the fine-tuning process. By leveraging the dynamism of sparsity, our approach mitigates the impact of well-learned samples and prioritizes underperforming instances for improvement in generalization. Across five tasks of sequence labeling, we demonstrate that FISH-DIP can smoothly optimize the model in low resource settings offering upto 40% performance improvements over full fine-tuning depending on target evaluation settings. Also, compared to in-context learning and other parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches, FISH-DIP performs comparably or better, notably in extreme low-resource settings. The source code of FISH-DIP will be available at [this URL](https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FISH-DIP)
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.433
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6998–7010
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.433
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.433
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Peng Shi, Wenpeng Yin, and Rui Zhang. 2023. Unified Low-Resource Sequence Labeling by Sample-Aware Dynamic Sparse Finetuning. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6998–7010, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unified Low-Resource Sequence Labeling by Sample-Aware Dynamic Sparse Finetuning (Das et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.433.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.433.mp4