Neural Network Pruning in Unsupervised Aspect Detection based on Aspect Embedding

Abstract

Aspect detection systems for online reviews, especially based on unsupervised models, are considered better strategically to process online reviews, generally a very large collection of unstructured data.  Aspect embedding-based deep learning models are designed for this problem however they still rely on redundant word embedding and they are sensitive to initialization which may have a significant impact on model performance. In this research, a pruning approach is used to reduce the redundancy of deep learning model connections and is expected to produce a model with similar or better performance. This research includes several experiments and comparisons of the results of pruning the model network weights based on the general neural network pruning strategy and the lottery ticket hypothesis. The result of this research is that pruning of the unsupervised aspect detection model, in general, can produce smaller submodels with similar performance even with a significant amount of weights pruned. Our sparse model with 80% of its total weight pruned has a similar performance to the original model. Our current pruning implementation, however, has not been able to produce sparse models with better performance.