Abbas Ghaddar

Md Akmal Haidar, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Abbas Ghaddar et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an efficient framework for compressing large-scale pre-trained language models. Recent years have seen a surge of research aiming to improve KD by leveraging Contrastive Learning, Intermediate Layer Distillation, Data Augmentation, and Adversarial Training. In this work, we propose a learning based data augmentation technique tailored for knowledge distillation, called CILDA. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that intermediate layer representations of the main task are used in improving the quality of augmented samples. More precisely, we introduce an augmentation technique for KD based on intermediate layer matching using contrastive loss to improve masked adversarial data augmentation. CILDA outperforms existing state-of-the-art KD approaches on the GLUE benchmark, as well as in an out-of-domain evaluation.

Abbas Ghaddar, Yimeng Wu, Sunyam Bagga et al.

There is a growing body of work in recent years to develop pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the Arabic language. This work concerns addressing two major problems in existing Arabic PLMs which constraint progress of the Arabic NLU and NLG fields.First, existing Arabic PLMs are not well-explored and their pre-trainig can be improved significantly using a more methodical approach. Second, there is a lack of systematic and reproducible evaluation of these models in the literature. In this work, we revisit both the pre-training and evaluation of Arabic PLMs. In terms of pre-training, we explore improving Arabic LMs from three perspectives: quality of the pre-training data, size of the model, and incorporating character-level information. As a result, we release three new Arabic BERT-style models ( JABER, Char-JABER, and SABER), and two T5-style models (AT5S and AT5B). In terms of evaluation, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to systematically evaluate the performance of existing state-of-the-art models on ALUE that is a leaderboard-powered benchmark for Arabic NLU tasks, and on a subset of the ARGEN benchmark for Arabic NLG tasks. We show that our models significantly outperform existing Arabic PLMs and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on discriminative and generative Arabic NLU and NLG tasks. Our models and source code to reproduce of results will be made available shortly.

Asaad Alghamdi, Xinyu Duan, Wei Jiang et al.

Developing monolingual large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is shown to be very successful in handling different tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this work, we present AraMUS, the largest Arabic PLM with 11B parameters trained on 529GB of high-quality Arabic textual data. AraMUS achieves state-of-the-art performances on a diverse set of Arabic classification and generative tasks. Moreover, AraMUS shows impressive few-shot learning abilities compared with the best existing Arabic PLMs.

Abbas Ghaddar, Philippe Langlais, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh et al.

Pretraining monolingual language models have been proven to be vital for performance in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the role of data in Arabic Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). More precisely, we reassess the performance of a suite of state-of-the-art Arabic PLMs by retraining them on massive-scale, high-quality Arabic corpora. We have significantly improved the performance of the leading Arabic encoder-only BERT-base and encoder-decoder T5-base models on the ALUE and ORCA leaderboards, thereby reporting state-of-the-art results in their respective model categories. In addition, our analysis strongly suggests that pretraining data by far is the primary contributor to performance, surpassing other factors. Our models and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Pretrained-Language-Model/tree/master/JABER-PyTorch.

Abbas Ghaddar, Yimeng Wu, Ahmad Rashid et al.

Language-specific pre-trained models have proven to be more accurate than multilingual ones in a monolingual evaluation setting, Arabic is no exception. However, we found that previously released Arabic BERT models were significantly under-trained. In this technical report, we present JABER and SABER, Junior and Senior Arabic BERt respectively, our pre-trained language model prototypes dedicated for Arabic. We conduct an empirical study to systematically evaluate the performance of models across a diverse set of existing Arabic NLU tasks. Experimental results show that JABER and SABER achieve state-of-the-art performances on ALUE, a new benchmark for Arabic Language Understanding Evaluation, as well as on a well-established NER benchmark.

Md Akmal Haidar, Nithin Anchuri, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh et al.

Intermediate layer knowledge distillation (KD) can improve the standard KD technique (which only targets the output of teacher and student models) especially over large pre-trained language models. However, intermediate layer distillation suffers from excessive computational burdens and engineering efforts required for setting up a proper layer mapping. To address these problems, we propose a RAndom Intermediate Layer Knowledge Distillation (RAIL-KD) approach in which, intermediate layers from the teacher model are selected randomly to be distilled into the intermediate layers of the student model. This randomized selection enforce that: all teacher layers are taken into account in the training process, while reducing the computational cost of intermediate layer distillation. Also, we show that it act as a regularizer for improving the generalizability of the student model. We perform extensive experiments on GLUE tasks as well as on out-of-domain test sets. We show that our proposed RAIL-KD approach outperforms other state-of-the-art intermediate layer KD methods considerably in both performance and training-time.

Abbas Ghaddar, Philippe Langlais

Neural network approaches to Named-Entity Recognition reduce the need for carefully hand-crafted features. While some features do remain in state-of-the-art systems, lexical features have been mostly discarded, with the exception of gazetteers. In this work, we show that this is unfair: lexical features are actually quite useful. We propose to embed words and entity types into a low-dimensional vector space we train from annotated data produced by distant supervision thanks to Wikipedia. From this, we compute - offline - a feature vector representing each word. When used with a vanilla recurrent neural network model, this representation yields substantial improvements. We establish a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 87.95 on ONTONOTES 5.0, while matching state-of-the-art performance with a F1 score of 91.73 on the over-studied CONLL-2003 dataset.