CLFeb 12, 2023
Transformer models: an introduction and catalogXavier Amatriain, Ananth Sankar, Jie Bing et al.
In the past few years we have seen the meteoric appearance of dozens of foundation models of the Transformer family, all of which have memorable and sometimes funny, but not self-explanatory, names. The goal of this paper is to offer a somewhat comprehensive but simple catalog and classification of the most popular Transformer models. The paper also includes an introduction to the most important aspects and innovations in Transformer models. Our catalog will include models that are trained using self-supervised learning (e.g., BERT or GPT3) as well as those that are further trained using a human-in-the-loop (e.g. the InstructGPT model used by ChatGPT).
IRAug 16, 2021
Deep Natural Language Processing for LinkedIn SearchWeiwei Guo, Xiaowei Liu, Sida Wang et al.
Many search systems work with large amounts of natural language data, e.g., search queries, user profiles, and documents. Building a successful search system requires a thorough understanding of textual data semantics, where deep learning based natural language processing techniques (deep NLP) can be of great help. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive study for applying deep NLP techniques to five representative tasks in search systems: query intent prediction (classification), query tagging (sequential tagging), document ranking (ranking), query auto completion (language modeling), and query suggestion (sequence to sequence). We also introduce BERT pre-training as a sixth task that can be applied to many of the other tasks. Through the model design and experiments of the six tasks, readers can find answers to four important questions: (1). When is deep NLP helpful/not helpful in search systems? (2). How to address latency challenges? (3). How to ensure model robustness? This work builds on existing efforts of LinkedIn search, and is tested at scale on LinkedIn's commercial search engines. We believe our experiences can provide useful insights for the industry and research communities.
CLJul 30, 2021
Deep Natural Language Processing for LinkedIn Search SystemsWeiwei Guo, Xiaowei Liu, Sida Wang et al.
Many search systems work with large amounts of natural language data, e.g., search queries, user profiles and documents, where deep learning based natural language processing techniques (deep NLP) can be of great help. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive study of applying deep NLP techniques to five representative tasks in search engines. Through the model design and experiments of the five tasks, readers can find answers to three important questions: (1) When is deep NLP helpful/not helpful in search systems? (2) How to address latency challenges? (3) How to ensure model robustness? This work builds on existing efforts of LinkedIn search, and is tested at scale on a commercial search engine. We believe our experiences can provide useful insights for the industry and research communities.