SNNLP: Energy-Efficient Natural Language Processing Using Spiking Neural Networks

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Main Authors: Knipper, R. Alexander, Mishty, Kaniz, Sadi, Mehdi, Santu, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Knipper, R. Alexander
Mishty, Kaniz
Sadi, Mehdi
Santu, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker
author_facet Knipper, R. Alexander
Mishty, Kaniz
Sadi, Mehdi
Santu, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker
contents As spiking neural networks receive more attention, we look toward applications of this computing paradigm in fields other than computer vision and signal processing. One major field, underexplored in the neuromorphic setting, is Natural Language Processing (NLP), where most state-of-the-art solutions still heavily rely on resource-consuming and power-hungry traditional deep learning architectures. Therefore, it is compelling to design NLP models for neuromorphic architectures due to their low energy requirements, with the additional benefit of a more human-brain-like operating model for processing information. However, one of the biggest issues with bringing NLP to the neuromorphic setting is in properly encoding text into a spike train so that it can be seamlessly handled by both current and future SNN architectures. In this paper, we compare various methods of encoding text as spikes and assess each method's performance in an associated SNN on a downstream NLP task, namely, sentiment analysis. Furthermore, we go on to propose a new method of encoding text as spikes that outperforms a widely-used rate-coding technique, Poisson rate-coding, by around 13\% on our benchmark NLP tasks. Subsequently, we demonstrate the energy efficiency of SNNs implemented in hardware for the sentiment analysis task compared to traditional deep neural networks, observing an energy efficiency increase of more than 32x during inference and 60x during training while incurring the expected energy-performance tradeoff.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_17911
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SNNLP: Energy-Efficient Natural Language Processing Using Spiking Neural Networks
Knipper, R. Alexander
Mishty, Kaniz
Sadi, Mehdi
Santu, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker
Computation and Language
As spiking neural networks receive more attention, we look toward applications of this computing paradigm in fields other than computer vision and signal processing. One major field, underexplored in the neuromorphic setting, is Natural Language Processing (NLP), where most state-of-the-art solutions still heavily rely on resource-consuming and power-hungry traditional deep learning architectures. Therefore, it is compelling to design NLP models for neuromorphic architectures due to their low energy requirements, with the additional benefit of a more human-brain-like operating model for processing information. However, one of the biggest issues with bringing NLP to the neuromorphic setting is in properly encoding text into a spike train so that it can be seamlessly handled by both current and future SNN architectures. In this paper, we compare various methods of encoding text as spikes and assess each method's performance in an associated SNN on a downstream NLP task, namely, sentiment analysis. Furthermore, we go on to propose a new method of encoding text as spikes that outperforms a widely-used rate-coding technique, Poisson rate-coding, by around 13\% on our benchmark NLP tasks. Subsequently, we demonstrate the energy efficiency of SNNs implemented in hardware for the sentiment analysis task compared to traditional deep neural networks, observing an energy efficiency increase of more than 32x during inference and 60x during training while incurring the expected energy-performance tradeoff.
title SNNLP: Energy-Efficient Natural Language Processing Using Spiking Neural Networks
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17911