Elementwise Language Representation

Abstract: We propose a new technique for computational language representation called elementwise embedding, in which a material (semantic unit) is abstracted into a horizontal concatenation of lower-dimensional element (character) embeddings. While elements are always characters, materials are arbitrary levels of semantic units so it generalizes to any type of tokenization. To focus only on the important letters, the $n^{th}$ spellings of each semantic unit are aligned in $n^{th}$ attention heads, then concatenated back into original forms creating unique embedding representations; they are jointly projected thereby determining own contextual importance. Technically, this framework is achieved by passing a sequence of materials, each consists of $v$ elements, to a transformer having $h=v$ attention heads. As a pure embedding technique, elementwise embedding replaces the $w$-dimensional embedding table of a transformer model with $256$ $c$-dimensional elements (each corresponding to one of UTF-8 bytes) where $c=w/v$. Using this novel approach, we show that the standard transformer architecture can be reused for all levels of language representations and be able to process much longer sequences at the same time-complexity without "any" architectural modification and additional overhead. BERT trained with elementwise embedding outperforms its subword equivalence (original implementation) in multilabel patent document classification exhibiting superior robustness to domain-specificity and data imbalance, despite using $0.005\%$ of embedding parameters. Experiments demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed method by successfully transferring these enhancements to differently architected transformers CANINE and ALBERT.