Sequence Models and Long-Short Term Memory Networks

• LSTM’s in Pytorch
• Example: An LSTM for Part-of-Speech Tagging
• Exercise: Augmenting the LSTM part-of-speech tagger with character-level features

Sequence models are central to NLP: they are models where there is some sort of dependence through time between your inputs. The classical example of a sequence model is the Hidden Markov Model for part-of-speech tagging. Another example is the conditional random field.

LSTM’s in Pytorch

Pytorch’s LSTM expects all of its inputs to be 3D tensors. The semantics of the axes of these tensors is important. The first axis is the sequence itself, the second indexes instances in the mini-batch, and the third indexes elements of the input. We haven’t discussed mini-batching, so lets just ignore that and assume we will always have just 1 dimension on the second axis. If we want to run the sequence model over the sentence “The cow jumped”, our input should look like

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import torch.nn.functional as F
import torch.optim as optim

torch.manual_seed(1)

lstm=nn.LSTM(3,3)   #Input dim is 3, output dim is 3
inputs = [torch.randn(1, 3) for _ in range(5)]  # make a sequence of length 5

# initialize the hidden state.
hidden = (torch.randn(1, 1, 3),
          torch.randn(1, 1, 3))

for i in inputs:
    out,hidden=lstm(i.view(1,1,-1),hidden)
    
inputs=torch.cat(inputs).view(len(inputs),1,-1)
hidden=(torch.randn(1,1,3),torch.randn(1,1,3))
out,hidden=lstm(inputs,hidden)
print(out)
print(hidden)

Example: An LSTM for Part-of-Speech Tagging

 Prepare data:

def prepare_sequence(seq, to_ix):
    idxs = [to_ix[w] for w in seq]
    return torch.tensor(idxs, dtype=torch.long)


training_data = [
    ("The dog ate the apple".split(), ["DET", "NN", "V", "DET", "NN"]),
    ("Everybody read that book".split(), ["NN", "V", "DET", "NN"])
]
word_to_ix = {}
for sent, tags in training_data:
    for word in sent:
        if word not in word_to_ix:
            word_to_ix[word] = len(word_to_ix)
print(word_to_ix)
tag_to_ix = {"DET": 0, "NN": 1, "V": 2}

# These will usually be more like 32 or 64 dimensional.
# We will keep them small, so we can see how the weights change as we train.
EMBEDDING_DIM = 6
HIDDEN_DIM = 6

Create the model:

class LSTMTagger(nn.Module):

    def __init__(self, embedding_dim, hidden_dim, vocab_size, tagset_size):
        super(LSTMTagger, self).__init__()
        self.hidden_dim = hidden_dim

        self.word_embeddings = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, embedding_dim)

        # The LSTM takes word embeddings as inputs, and outputs hidden states
        # with dimensionality hidden_dim.
        self.lstm = nn.LSTM(embedding_dim, hidden_dim)

        # The linear layer that maps from hidden state space to tag space
        self.hidden2tag = nn.Linear(hidden_dim, tagset_size)
        self.hidden = self.init_hidden()

    def init_hidden(self):
        # Before we've done anything, we dont have any hidden state.
        # Refer to the Pytorch documentation to see exactly
        # why they have this dimensionality.
        # The axes semantics are (num_layers, minibatch_size, hidden_dim)
        return (torch.zeros(1, 1, self.hidden_dim),
                torch.zeros(1, 1, self.hidden_dim))

    def forward(self, sentence):
        embeds = self.word_embeddings(sentence)
        lstm_out, self.hidden = self.lstm(
            embeds.view(len(sentence), 1, -1), self.hidden)
        tag_space = self.hidden2tag(lstm_out.view(len(sentence), -1))
        tag_scores = F.log_softmax(tag_space, dim=1)
        return tag_scores

Train the model:

model = LSTMTagger(EMBEDDING_DIM, HIDDEN_DIM, len(word_to_ix), len(tag_to_ix))
loss_function = nn.NLLLoss()
optimizer = optim.SGD(model.parameters(), lr=0.1)

# See what the scores are before training
# Note that element i,j of the output is the score for tag j for word i.
# Here we don't need to train, so the code is wrapped in torch.no_grad()
with torch.no_grad():
    inputs = prepare_sequence(training_data[0][0], word_to_ix)
    tag_scores = model(inputs)
    print(tag_scores)

for epoch in range(300):  # again, normally you would NOT do 300 epochs, it is toy data
    for sentence, tags in training_data:
        # Step 1. Remember that Pytorch accumulates gradients.
        # We need to clear them out before each instance
        model.zero_grad()

        # Also, we need to clear out the hidden state of the LSTM,
        # detaching it from its history on the last instance.
        model.hidden = model.init_hidden()

        # Step 2. Get our inputs ready for the network, that is, turn them into
        # Tensors of word indices.
        sentence_in = prepare_sequence(sentence, word_to_ix)
        targets = prepare_sequence(tags, tag_to_ix)

        # Step 3. Run our forward pass.
        tag_scores = model(sentence_in)

        # Step 4. Compute the loss, gradients, and update the parameters by
        #  calling optimizer.step()
        loss = loss_function(tag_scores, targets)
        loss.backward()
        optimizer.step()

# See what the scores are after training
with torch.no_grad():
    inputs = prepare_sequence(training_data[0][0], word_to_ix)
    tag_scores = model(inputs)

    # The sentence is "the dog ate the apple".  i,j corresponds to score for tag j
    # for word i. The predicted tag is the maximum scoring tag.
    # Here, we can see the predicted sequence below is 0 1 2 0 1
    # since 0 is index of the maximum value of row 1,
    # 1 is the index of maximum value of row 2, etc.
    # Which is DET NOUN VERB DET NOUN, the correct sequence!
    print(tag_scores)