The modern deep learning approaches to natural language processing are voracious in their demands for large corpora to train on. Folk wisdom estimates used to be around 100k documents were required for effective training. The availability of broadly trained, general-purpose models like BERT has made it possible to do transfer learning to achieve novel results on much smaller corpora. Thanks to these advancements, an NLP researcher might get value out of fewer examples since they can use the transfer learning to get a head start and focus on learning the nuances of the language specifically relevant to the task at hand. Thus, small specialized corpora are both useful and practical to create.

Episode Info: Machine learning models are often criticized for being black boxes. If a human cannot determine why the model arrives at the decision it made, there's good cause for skepticism. Classic inspection approaches to model interpretability are only useful for simple models, which are likely to only cover simple problems. The LIME project seeks to help us trust machine learning models. At a high level, it takes advantage of local fidelity.