When is multitask learning effective? Semantic sequence prediction under varying data conditions

EACL 2017  ·  Héctor Martínez Alonso, Barbara Plank ·

Multitask learning has been applied successfully to a range of tasks, mostly morphosyntactic. However, little is known on when MTL works and whether there are data characteristics that help to determine its success. In this paper we evaluate a range of semantic sequence labeling tasks in a MTL setup. We examine different auxiliary tasks, amongst which a novel setup, and correlate their impact to data-dependent conditions. Our results show that MTL is not always effective, significant improvements are obtained only for 1 out of 5 tasks. When successful, auxiliary tasks with compact and more uniform label distributions are preferable.

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