Distilling Word Embeddings

Lili Mou, Ran Jia, Yan Xu, Ge Li, Lu Zhang, Zhi Gang Jin · 2016

Distilling knowledge from a well-trained cumbersome network to a small one has recently become a new research topic, as lightweight neural networks with high performance are particularly in need in various resource-restricted systems. This paper addresses the problem of distilling word embeddings for NLP tasks. We propose an encoding approach to distill task-specific knowledge from a set of high-dimensional embeddings, so that we can reduce model complexity by a large margin as well as retain high accuracy, achieving a good compromise between efficiency and performance. Experiments reveal the phenomenon that distilling knowledge from cumbersome embeddings is better than directly training neural networks with small embeddings.

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