Convolutional neural network compression for natural language processing

Convolutional neural networks are modern models that are very efficient in many classification tasks. They were originally created for image processing purposes. Then some trials were performed to use them in different domains like natural language processing. The artificial intelligence systems (like humanoid robots) are very often based on embedded systems with constraints on memory, power consumption etc. Therefore convolutional neural network because of its memory capacity should be reduced to be mapped to given hardware. In this paper, results are presented of compressing the efficient convolutional neural networks for sentiment analysis. The main steps are quantization and pruning processes. The method responsible for mapping compressed network to FPGA and results of this implementation are presented. The described simulations showed that 5-bit width is enough to have no drop in accuracy from floating point version of the network. Additionally, significant memory footprint reduction was achieved (from 85% up to 93%).

Improving text classification with vectors of reduced precision

This paper presents the analysis of the impact of a floating-point number precision reduction on the quality of text classification. The precision reduction of the vectors representing the data (e.g. TF-IDF representation in our case) allows for a decrease of computing time and memory footprint on dedicated hardware platforms. The impact of precision reduction on the classification quality was performed on 5 corpora, using 4 different classifiers. Also, dimensionality reduction was taken into account. Results indicate that the precision reduction improves classification accuracy for most cases (up to 25% of error reduction). In general, the reduction from 64 to 4 bits gives the best scores and ensures that the results will not be worse than with the full floating-point representation.