Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification

Jeremy Howard; Sebastian Ruder

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arXiv · 1801.06146

Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification

Jeremy Howard·Sebastian Ruder

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Abstract

Inductive transfer learning has greatly impacted computer vision, but existing approaches in NLP still require task-specific modifications and training from scratch. We propose Universal Language Model Fine-tuning (ULMFiT), an effective transfer learning method that can be applied to any task in NLP, and introduce techniques that are key for fine-tuning a language model. Our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on six text classification tasks, reducing the error by 18-24% on the majority of datasets. Furthermore, with only 100 labeled examples, it matches the performance of training from scratch on 100x more data. We open-source our pretrained models and code.

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Jeremy Howard, Sebastian Ruder. 2018-01-18. Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06146

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