In plain words: A text classifier is first taught to predict words from general text, then gently adjusted for the specific job instead of being built from scratch. With only a handful of labeled examples it matched a from-scratch model trained on 100 times more data.
Abstract · Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification
Inductive transfer learning has greatly impacted computer vision, but existing approaches in NLP still require task-specific modifications and training from scratch. We propose Universal Language Model Fine-tuning (ULMFiT), an effective transfer learning method that can be applied to any task in NLP, and introduce techniques that are key for fine-tuning a language model. Our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on six text classification tasks, reducing the error by 18-24% on the majority of datasets. Furthermore, with only 100 labeled examples, it matches the performance of training from scratch on 100x more data. We open-source our pretrained models and code.
Jeremy Howard, Sebastian Ruder
arXiv:1801.06146 · cs.CL, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jan 18, 2018 · updated May 23, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · ACL 2018, fixed denominator in Equation 3, line 3