Multi-source Attention for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
This addresses the challenge of improving model generalization across domains in NLP, but it is incremental as it builds on existing domain adaptation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of selecting appropriate sources in multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation to avoid negative transfer, and the proposed attention-based method outperforms prior methods on cross-domain sentiment classification benchmarks.
Domain adaptation considers the problem of generalising a model learnt using data from a particular source domain to a different target domain. Often it is difficult to find a suitable single source to adapt from, and one must consider multiple sources. Using an unrelated source can result in sub-optimal performance, known as the \emph{negative transfer}. However, it is challenging to select the appropriate source(s) for classifying a given target instance in multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). We model source-selection as an attention-learning problem, where we learn attention over sources for a given target instance. For this purpose, we first independently learn source-specific classification models, and a relatedness map between sources and target domains using pseudo-labelled target domain instances. Next, we learn attention-weights over the sources for aggregating the predictions of the source-specific models. Experimental results on cross-domain sentiment classification benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms prior proposals in multi-source UDA.