Focal Loss for Punctuation Prediction

Many approaches have been proposed to predict punctuation marks. Previous results demonstrate that these methods are effective. However, there still exists class imbalance problem during training. Most of the classes in the training set for punctuation prediction are non-punctuation marks. This will affect the performance of punctuation prediction tasks. Therefore, this paper uses a focal loss to alleviate this issue. The focal loss can down-weight easy examples and focus training on a sparse set of hard examples. Experiments are conducted on IWSLT2011 datasets. The results show that the punctuation predicting models trained with a focal loss obtain performance improvement over that trained with a cross entropy loss by up to 2.7% absolute overall F1-score on test set. The proposed model also outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.