Bag-of-Words Algorithms Can Supplement Transformer Sequence Classification & Improve Model Interpretability

by Christian Johnson, William Marcellino

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Although transformer models perform extremely well on many natural language tasks, they may struggle with computing and memory requirements on long sequences, and often require significant amounts of computing power to train. Such models also lack interpretability. We describe a simple method of improving performance on the problem of classifying sequences of text by concatenating the hidden state of a BERT-based transformer model with a dictionary-based bag-of-words model. The hybrid models that result outperform the transformer models by varying margins, while adding trivial amounts of compute requirements and boosting model interpretability.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter One

    Introduction

  • Chapter Two

    Performance Improvements

  • Chapter Three

    Failure Modes Provide Insight

This research was sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and conducted within the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND National Security Research Division (NSRD).

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