Extreme Model Compression for On-device Natural Language Understanding

11/30/2020

∙

by   Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

In this paper, we propose and experiment with techniques for extreme compression of neural natural language understanding (NLU) models, making them suitable for execution on resource-constrained devices. We propose a task-aware, end-to-end compression approach that performs word-embedding compression jointly with NLU task learning. We show our results on a large-scale, commercial NLU system trained on a varied set of intents with huge vocabulary sizes. Our approach outperforms a range of baselines and achieves a compression rate of 97.4 performance. Our analysis indicates that the signal from the downstream task is important for effective compression with minimal degradation in performance.