Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification

ACL 2018  ·  Jeremy Howard, Sebastian Ruder ·

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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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Text Classification AG News ULMFiT Error 5.01 # 4
Text Classification DBpedia ULMFiT Error 0.80 # 6
Sentiment Analysis IMDb ULMFiT Accuracy 95.4 # 15
Text Classification TREC-6 ULMFiT Error 3.6 # 5
Sentiment Analysis Yelp Binary classification ULMFiT Error 2.16 # 7
Sentiment Analysis Yelp Fine-grained classification ULMFiT Error 29.98 # 5

Methods