LSTM and Hierarchical Attention Network

Goal

In this repo we demonstrate how to build and train two different neural network architectures for classification of text documents. We show a simple implementation on an NC series Data Science Virtual Machine with a Tesla K80 GPU, that uses the Keras API for deep learning. Keras is a front end to three of the most popular deep learning frameworks, CNTK, Tensorflow and Theano.

Data

We train these networks on documents from the Internet archive, originating from [McAuley and Leskovec, Hidden Factors and Hidden Topics: Understanding Rating Dimensions with Review Text, RecSys, 2013]. The text consists of Amazon reviews of food products by users with the labels being the ratings given to the products. In the notebooks, we downsample this data to 10,000 training and 10,000 test samples and convert the ratings to binary labels.

Preprocessing & Initialization

To generate the inputs to the network from the text data, a preprocessing tokenization step is required. Here we use the Tokenizer class from Keras which we fit on the most frequent words in the training data set and we also replace infrequent words with a single token. Thus each document can be represented as a vector of word indexes. A truncation / padding with zeros is then applied so that all vectors have equal length. Masking out these zeros can be toggled in the first layer of the network, which is an embedding layer.

The initialization of the embedding layer of each network can affect the accuracy of the model and the speed of convergence significantly. To compute an initial embedding, we use word2vec with skip-grams, since it yields better results than the default random initialization. For a more detailed description of word embeddings and word2vec see, for example, this tutorial.

LSTM

The first layer in this architecture is an embedding layer, which maps each (one-hot encoded) word index to a vector by a linear transformation. Thus each document vector is mapped to a sequence of output vectors via an embedding matrix (which is learned during training). The output of the embedding layer is fed into a bidirectional LSTM layer with 100 units (in each direction). The output is then obtained with a fully connected layer. This network is optimized with stochastic gradient descent using the cross entropy loss. We also use l2 regularization in all layers.

Using a document length of 300 words and an embedding dimensionality equal to 100, we obtain a model architecture with 761,202 trainable weights, of which the large majority resides in the embedding layer.

Hierarchical Attention Network

This is the architecture proposed in Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification, Yang et al. 2016. One of its main features is the hierarchical structure, which consists of two levels of bidirectional GRU layers, one for the sequence of words in each sentence, the second for the sequence of sentences in each document. Another feature of the architecture is that it uses an attention layer at both the sentence and word levels. The attention mechanism is the one proposed in Bahdanau et al. 2014 and allows for weighting words in each sentence (and sentences in each document) with different degrees of importance according to the context.

We have implemented the Hierarchical Attention Network in Keras and Theano by adapting Richard Liao's implementation. We use a sentence length of 50 words and a document length of 15 sentences. We set the embedding, context and GRU dimensionalities according to the Hierarchical Attention Network paper. We also follow other choices from this paper, that is, initialize the embedding with word2vec; optimize with SGD and momentum; and reorder the documents in the training batches by number of sentences. We also opt to use l2 regularization in all layers. In this way we obtain an architecture with 942,102 trainable weights.

The second layer expands to the following model, which is distributed to all the sentences:

Performance

We have not fine tuned the hyperparameters, but have tried a few values as an indication. With LSTM we obtain a classification accuracy of 80% and AUC = 0.88; with the hierarchical attention network we obtain 89% accuracy and AUC = 0.96. They both take about 1 minute per epoch to train.

Since most of the weights reside in the embedding layer, the training time depends strongly on the size of the vocabulary and the output dimensionality of the embedding. Other factors are the framework (using CNTK is about twice as fast as Tensorflow) and masking (handling of the padded zeros for variable length sequences), which slows down the training. We have also observed that initializing the embedding with word2vec speeds up significantly the convergence to a good value of accuracy.

Implementation details

We have trained the models on an Azure NC series Data Science Virtual Machine with a Tesla K80 GPU. In the cases of CNTK and Tensorflow, the framework handles the execution on the GPU automatically. Tensorflow may throw a ResourceExhaustedError, due to taking up all the GPU memory. If this error occurs the remedy is to decrease the batch size.

The case of Theano is not so straightforward and requires some manual configuration before executing the code. See the Theano configuration and gpuarray docs for more details. In brief, the following steps are required:

1. Ensure the right python dependencies (with conda install pygpu)

2. Replace $HOME/.theanorc with:

    [global]
    floatX = float32
    device = gpu0
    [lib]
    gpuarray.preallocate=1

3. Set the environment variable THEANO_FLAGS to floatX=float32,device=gpu0 and add /usr/local/cuda-8.0/bin to the PATH environment variable.