Multi-task Learning of Pairwise Sequence Classification Tasks Over Disparate Label Spaces

NAACL 2018 · Isabelle Augenstein, Sebastian Ruder, Anders Søgaard ·

We combine multi-task learning and semi-supervised learning by inducing a joint embedding space between disparate label spaces and learning transfer functions between label embeddings, enabling us to jointly leverage unlabelled data and auxiliary, annotated datasets. We evaluate our approach on a variety of sequence classification tasks with disparate label spaces. We outperform strong single and multi-task baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art for topic-based sentiment analysis.