Input-length-shortening and text generation via attention values

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention (i.e., relevance) scores to some words than others. Because of the attention mechanism's high computational cost, transformer models usually have an input-length limitation caused by hardware constraints. This limitation applies to many transformers, including the well-known bidirectional encoder representations of the transformer (BERT) model. In this paper, we examined BERT's attention assignment mechanism, focusing on two questions: (1) How can attention be employed to reduce input length? (2) How can attention be used as a control mechanism for conditional text generation? We investigated these questions in the context of a text classification task. We discovered that BERT's early layers assign more critical attention scores for text classification tasks compared to later layers. We demonstrated that the first layer's attention sums could be used to filter tokens in a given sequence, considerably decreasing the input length while maintaining good test accuracy. We also applied filtering, which uses a compute-efficient semantic similarities algorithm, and discovered that retaining approximately 6% of the original sequence is sufficient to obtain 86.5% accuracy. Finally, we showed that we could generate data in a stable manner and indistinguishable from the original one by only using a small percentage (10%) of the tokens with high attention scores according to BERT's first layer.