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Transformer-based models have pushed state of the art in many areas of NLP, but our understanding of what is behind their success is still limited. This paper is the first survey of over 150 studies of the popular BERT model. We review the current state of knowledge about how BERT works, what kind of information it learns and how it is represented, common modifications to its training objectives and architecture, the overparameterization issue, and approaches to compression. We then outline directions for future research.

NAACL 2021

A Primer in BERTology: What We Know About How BERT Works

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

In this work we explore Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) of pretrained language models for downstream tasks. We introduce UDALM, a fine-tuning procedure, using a mixed classification and Masked Language Model loss, that can adapt to the target domain distribution in a robust and sample efficient manner. Our experiments show that performance of models trained with the mixed loss scales with the amount of available target data and the mixed loss can be effectively used as a stopping criterion during UDA training. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between A-distance and the target error and explore some limitations of the Domain Adversarial Training approach. Our method is evaluated on twelve domain pairs of the Amazon Reviews Sentiment dataset, yielding 91.74% accuracy, which is an 1.11% absolute improvement over the state-of-the-art.

UDALM: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Language Modeling

First-order meta-learning algorithms have been widely used in practice to learn initial model parameters that can be quickly adapted to new tasks due to their efficiency and effectiveness. However, existing studies find that meta-learner can overfit to some specific adaptation when we have heterogeneous tasks, leading to significantly degraded performance. In Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, datasets are often diverse and each task has its unique characteristics. Therefore, to address the overfitting issue when applying first-order meta-learning to NLP applications, we propose to reduce the variance of the gradient estimator used in task adaptation. To this end, we develop a variance-reduced first-order meta-learning algorithm. The core of our algorithm is to introduce a novel variance reduction term to the gradient estimation when performing the task adaptation. Experiments on two NLP applications: few-shot text classification and multi-domain dialog state tracking demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method.

Variance-reduced First-order Meta-learning for Natural Language Processing Tasks

Deep neural networks and huge language models are becoming omnipresent in natural language applications. As they are known for requiring large amounts of training data, there is a growing body of work to improve the performance in low-resource settings. Motivated by the recent fundamental changes towards neural models and the popular pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, we survey promising approaches for low-resource natural language processing. After a discussion about the different dimensions of data availability, we give a structured overview of methods that enable learning when training data is sparse. This includes mechanisms to create additional labeled data like data augmentation and distant supervision as well as transfer learning settings that reduce the need for target supervision. A goal of our survey is to explain how these methods differ in their requirements as understanding them is essential for choosing a technique suited for a specific low-resource setting. Further key aspects of this work are to highlight open issues and to outline promising directions for future research.

A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios

Representation learning approaches for knowledge graphs have been mostly designed for static data. However, many knowledge graphs involve evolving data, e.g., the fact (The President of the United States is Barack Obama) is valid only from 2009 to 2017. This introduces important challenges for knowledge representation learning since the knowledge graphs change over time. In this paper, we present a novel time-aware knowledge graph embebdding approach, TeLM, which performs 4th-order tensor factorization of a Temporal knowledge graph using a Linear temporal regularizer and Multivector embeddings. Moreover, we investigate the effect of the temporal dataset's time granularity on temporal knowledge graph completion. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed models trained with the linear temporal regularizer achieve the state-of-the-art performances on link prediction over four well-established temporal knowledge graph completion benchmarks.

Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion using a Linear Temporal Regularizer and Multivector Embeddings

While the predictive performance of modern statistical dependency parsers relies heavily on the availability of expensive expert-annotated treebank data, not all annotations contribute equally to the training of the parsers. In this paper, we attempt to reduce the number of labeled examples needed to train a strong dependency parser using batch active learning (AL). In particular, we investigate whether enforcing diversity in the sampled batches, using determinantal point processes (DPPs), can improve over their diversity-agnostic counterparts. Simulation experiments on an English newswire corpus show that selecting diverse batches with DPPs is superior to strong selection strategies that do not enforce batch diversity, especially during the initial stages of the learning process. Additionally, our diversity-aware strategy is robust under a corpus duplication setting, where diversity-agnostic sampling strategies exhibit significant degradation.

Diversity-Aware Batch Active Learning for Dependency Parsing

Code summarization and generation empower conversion between programming language(PL) and natural language (NL), while code translation avails the migration of legacy code from one PL to another. This paper introduces PLBART, a sequence-to-sequence model capable of performing a broad spectrum of program and language understanding and generation tasks. PLBART is pre-trained on an extensive collection of Java and Python functions and associated NL text via denoising autoencoding. Experiments on code summarization in the English language, code generation, and code translation in seven programming languages show that PLBART outperforms or rivals state-of-the-art models. Moreover, experiments on discriminative tasks,e.g., program repair, clone detection, and vulnerable code detection, demonstrate PLBART’s effectiveness in program understanding. Furthermore, analysis reveals that PLBART learns program syn-tax, style (e.g., identifier naming convention), logical flow (e.g., if block inside an else block is equivalent to else if block) that are crucial to program semantics and thus excels even with limited annotations.

Unified Pre-training for Program Understanding and Generation

When fine-tuning pretrained models for classification, researchers either use a generic model head or a task-specific prompt for prediction. Proponents of prompting have argued that prompts provide a method for injecting task-specific guidance, which is beneficial in low-data regimes. We aim to quantify this benefit through rigorous testing of prompts in a fair setting: comparing prompted and head-based fine-tuning in equal conditions across many tasks and data sizes. By controlling for many sources of advantage, we find that prompting does indeed provide a benefit, and that this benefit can be quantified per task. Results show that prompting is often worth 100s of data points on average across classification tasks.

How many data points is a prompt worth?

Domain classification is the fundamental task in natural language understanding (NLU), which often requires fast accommodation to new emerging domains. We proposed a hyperparameter-free continual learning model for text data that can stably produce high performance under various environments. We utilize Fisher information to select exemplars that can “record” key information of the original model. Also, a novel scheme called dynamical weight consolidation is proposed to enable hyperparameter-free learning during the retrain process. Extensive experiments demonstrate baselines provide fluctuated performance which makes them useless in practice. On the contrary, our proposed model significantly and consistently outperforms the best state-of-the-art method by up to 20% in average accuracy, and each of its components contributes effectively to over- all performance.

Hyperparameter-free Continuous Learning for Domain Classification in Natural Language Understanding

Current sequence-to-sequence models are trained to minimize cross-entropy and use softmax to compute the locally normalized probabilities over target sequences.

Smoothing and Shrinking the Sparse Seq2Seq Search Space

Latent alignment objectives such as CTC and AXE significantly improve non-autoregressive machine translation models. Can they improve autoregressive models as well? We explore the possibility of training autoregressive machine translation models with latent alignment objectives, and observe that, in practice, this approach results in degenerate models. We provide a theoretical explanation for these empirical results, and prove that latent alignment objectives are incompatible with teacher forcing.

A Primer in BERTology: What We Know About How BERT Works

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