CLJun 21, 2024Code
Unsupervised Morphological Tree TokenizerQingyang Zhu, Xiang Hu, Pengyu Ji et al.
As a cornerstone in language modeling, tokenization involves segmenting text inputs into pre-defined atomic units. Conventional statistical tokenizers often disrupt constituent boundaries within words, thereby corrupting semantic information. To address this drawback, we introduce morphological structure guidance to tokenization and propose a deep model to induce character-level structures of words. Specifically, the deep model jointly encodes internal structures and representations of words with a mechanism named $\textit{MorphOverriding}$ to ensure the indecomposability of morphemes. By training the model with self-supervised objectives, our method is capable of inducing character-level structures that align with morphological rules without annotated training data. Based on the induced structures, our algorithm tokenizes words through vocabulary matching in a top-down manner. Empirical results indicate that the proposed method effectively retains complete morphemes and outperforms widely adopted methods such as BPE and WordPiece on both morphological segmentation tasks and language modeling tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/martianmartina/TreeTokenizer.
NIMay 4
A Protocol-Independent Transport ArchitectureKimiya Mohammadtaheri, David Gao, Samuel Zhang et al.
The network transport layer is increasingly implemented in the NIC hardware to meet the performance demands of modern workloads, but this has made it difficult to evolve or deploy new transport protocols. Existing approaches either fix protocol logic in the data-path or build protocol-specific assumptions into the architecture that limit the range of protocols that can be supported on a single hardware substrate. We present PITA, a protocol-independent transport architecture that enables full data-path programmability while sustaining line-rate performance. PITA eliminates protocol-specific assumptions by structuring the data-path around a uniform abstraction over events, state, and instructions, and rethinks core components, including scheduling, packet generation, and data reassembly, to operate on this abstraction. We evaluate PITA along key dimensions reflecting the goals of its protocol-agnostic datapath design. Specifically, we show that PITA supports diverse protocol semantics by showing it can implement TCP and \roce on the same data path and preserve their distinct end-to-end behavior. Through targeted microbenchmarks and synthesis on Alveo U250 cards, we show that PITA's redesigned components sustain high performance under demanding conditions, with modest hardware overhead and meeting timing at 250MHz.
CLMar 13, 2024
Generative Pretrained Structured Transformers: Unsupervised Syntactic Language Models at ScaleXiang Hu, Pengyu Ji, Qingyang Zhu et al.
A syntactic language model (SLM) incrementally generates a sentence with its syntactic tree in a left-to-right manner. We present Generative Pretrained Structured Transformers (GPST), an unsupervised SLM at scale capable of being pre-trained from scratch on raw texts with high parallelism. GPST circumvents the limitations of previous SLMs such as relying on gold trees and sequential training. It consists of two components, a usual SLM supervised by a uni-directional language modeling loss, and an additional composition model, which induces syntactic parse trees and computes constituent representations, supervised by a bi-directional language modeling loss. We propose a representation surrogate to enable joint parallel training of the two models in a hard-EM fashion. We pre-train GPST on OpenWebText, a corpus with $9$ billion tokens, and demonstrate the superiority of GPST over GPT-2 with a comparable size in numerous tasks covering both language understanding and language generation. Meanwhile, GPST also significantly outperforms existing unsupervised SLMs on left-to-right grammar induction, while holding a substantial acceleration on training.