Title: Preserving Intermediate Objectives: One Simple Trick to Improve Learning for Hierarchical Models,
Abstract: Hierarchical models are utilized in a wide variety of problems which are
characterized by task hierarchies, where predictions on smaller subtasks are
useful for trying to predict a final task. Typically, neural networks are first
trained for the subtasks, and the predictions of these networks are
subsequently used as additional features when training a model and doing
inference for a final task. In this work, we focus on improving learning for
such hierarchical models and demonstrate our method on the task of speaker
trait prediction. Speaker trait prediction aims to computationally identify
which personality traits a speaker might be perceived to have, and has been of
great interest to both the Artificial Intelligence and Social Science
communities. Persuasiveness prediction in particular has been of interest, as
persuasive speakers have a large amount of influence on our thoughts, opinions
and beliefs. In this work, we examine how leveraging the relationship between
related speaker traits in a hierarchical structure can help improve our ability
to predict how persuasive a speaker is. We present a novel algorithm that
allows us to backpropagate through this hierarchy. This hierarchical model
achieves a 25% relative error reduction in classification accuracy over current
state-of-the art methods on the publicly available POM dataset.