Sebastian Ruder, Barbara Plank (2017). Learning to select data for transfer learning with Bayesian Optimization. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Robust Bayesian Optimization framework RoBO needs to be installed. It can be installed using the following steps:

1. First, install libeigen3-dev as a prerequisite: sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev (*)
2. Then, clone the RoBO repository: git clone https://github.com/automl/RoBO.git
3. Change into the directory: cd RoBO/
4. Install RoBOs requirements: for req in $(cat all_requirements.txt); do pip install $req; done
5. Finally, install RoBO: python setup.py install

For the topic models, gensim needs to be installed: pip install gensim

We use the neural network library DyNet, which works well with networks that have dynamic structures. DyNet can be installed by following the instructions here.

• bilstm_tagger: The repository containing code for the Bi-LSTM tagger from Plank et al. (2016).
• bist_parser: The repository containing the code for the BIST parser from Kiperwasser and Goldberg (2016).
• bayes_opt.py: The main logic for running Bayesian Optimization.
• constants.py: Constants that are shared across all files.
• data_utils.py: Utility methods for data reading and processing.
• features.py: Methods for generating feature representations.
• similarity.py: Methods for measuring domain similarity.
• simpletagger.py: Code for running the Structured Perceptron POS tagger.
• task_utils.py: Utility methods for training and evaluation.

The main logic for running Bayesian Optimization can be found in bayes_opt.py. The features that are currently used are currently defined in constants.py as FEATURE_SETS and are split into diversity and similarity features. Bayesian Optimization minimizes the validation error on the specified dataset.

python bayes_opt.py --dynet-autobatch 1 -d data/gweb_sancl -m models/model \
                    -t emails newsgroups reviews weblogs wsj --task pos \
                    -b random most-similar-examples \
                    --parser-output-path parser_outputs \
                    --perl-script-path bist_parser/bmstparser/src/util_scripts/eval.pl \
                    -f similarity --z-norm --num-iterations 100 \
                    --num-runs 1 --log-file logs/log

• dynet-autobatch 1: use DyNet auto-batching
• -d data/gweb_sancl: use the data from the SANCL 2012 shared task
• -m models/model: specify the directory where the model should be saved
• -t emails newsgroups reviews weblogs wsj: adapt to the specified target domains in the order they were provided
• --task pos: perform POS tagging with the Structured Perceptron model
• -b: use the random and most-similar-examples baselines
• --parser-output-path, --perl-script-path: only required when performing parsing
• -f: use only similarity features with Bayesian Optimization
• --z-norm: perform z-normalisation (recommended)
• --num-iterations: perform 100 iterations of Bayesian Optimization
• --num-runs: perform one run of Bayesian Optimization per target domain
• --log-file: log the results of the baselines and Bayesian Optimization to this file

In order to add a new task, you need to do several things:

• Add the new task to TASKS, TASK2TRAIN_EXAMPLES, and TASK2DOMAINS in constants.py.
• Add a method to read data for the task to data_utils.py and add the mapping to data_utils.task2read_data_func.
• Add a method to train and evaluate the task to task_utils.py and add the mapping to task_utils.task2train_and_evaluate_func.
• Add the function that should be minimized to bayes_opt.py and add the mapping to task2_objective_function. The function should take as input the feature weights and output the error.

New feature sets or features can be added by adding them to constants.py. Similarity features or new representations can be added to similarity.py. Diversity features or any other features can to be added to features.py. All new features must be added to get_feature_representations and get_feature_names in features.py.

The Amazon Reviews Multi-Domain Sentiment Dataset (Blitzer et al., 2007) used in the current Bayesian Optimization experiment can be downloaded using the following steps:

1. Create a new amazon-reviews directory: mkdir amazon-reviews
2. Change into the directory: cd amazon-reviews
3. Download the dataset: wget https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~mdredze/datasets/sentiment/processed_acl.tar.gz
4. Extract the dataset: tar -xvf processed_acl.tar.gz

In bayes_opt.py, the data-path argument should now be pointed to the amazon-reviews directory.

We use the data from the SANCL 2012 shared task/English Web Treebank.

Pre-trained word embeddings can be downloaded from here. We are using GloVe embeddings in the paper, but other pre-trained embeddings are also possible. Smaller embedding files can be used for faster iteration.

We use the BIST parser from Kiperwasser and Goldberg (2016) for our experiments. The parser repo can be found here and was integrated using git submodule.

For running the parser with Bayesian Optimization, two additional hyperparameters are necessary:

• --perl-script-path: This is the location of the perl script that is used to evaluate the parser's predictions. The script is located in bist_parser/bmstparser/src/util_scripts/eval.pl per default.
• --parser-output-path: This is the location of the folder where the parser's predictions and the output of the perl script will be written to.

Per default, Labeled Attachment Score on the held-out validation set is used to evaluate the parser's performance and evaluation results are saved to a subfolders of parser-output-path that indicate the target domain and feature sets used. Another subsubfolder is created for the best weights configuration so that Labeled Attachment Score, Unlabeled Attachment Score and Accuracy as well as other statistics are available for the final test set evaluation.

The Bi-LSTM tagger we are using is a simplified, single-task version of the hierarchical Multi-task Bi-LSTM tagger used by Plank et al. (2016). The source repository of the tagger can be found here.

In case you you do not have sudo rights to run sudo apt-get install libeigen3-dev here is a workaround.

Create a folder where you download the sources of libeigen3-dev:

mkdir -p tools/eigen3
cd tools/eigen3
apt-get source libeigen3-dev

Afterwards point the required packages for RoBo to the folder just created: tools/eigen3/eigen3-3.2.0

For instance, to install the 'george' requirement of RoBo, add the --global-option parameters pointing to the eigen directory:

pip install git+https://github.com/sfalkner/george.git --global-option=build_ext --global-option=-I/path/to/tools/eigen3/eigen3-3.2.0

(see http://dan.iel.fm/george/current/user/quickstart/#installation -> if you have Eigen in a strange place)

If you make use of the contents of this repository, we appreciate citing the following paper:

@inproceedings{ruder2017select,
  title={{Learning to select data for transfer learning with Bayesian Optimization}},
  author={Ruder, Sebastian and Plank, Barbara},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year={2017}
}