| Challenge: | Pretrained Language Models possess significant linguistic, common sense and factual knowledge, but are short of the capability required for general common-sense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to train pretrained language models with a method of canonicalizing numbers . they address a task which is also pre-requisite for general common-sense reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can answer questions about common sense and linguistics, but lacks the capability to answer questions on scalar attributes. |
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Do Language Models Understand Measurements? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on numerical reasoning over text (NRoT) tests PLMs to understand numbers in contexts where numbers are an integral part of the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple embedding strategy to better distinguish between numbers and units, which leads to a significant improvement in probing tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model distinguishes between numbers and units, which leads to significant improvement in probing tasks. |
Pre-trained Language Models Learn Remarkably Accurate Representations of Numbers (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work showed limited success in probing numeric values from models’ representations, indicating that these errors can be attributed to the inherent unreliability of distributionally learned embeddings in representing exact quantities. |
| Approach: | They propose a probing technique that decodes numeric values from input embeddings with near-perfect accuracy across a range of open-source LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed probing technique decodes numeric values from input embeddings with near-perfect accuracy across a range of open-source LMs. |
oLMpics-On What Language Model Pre-training Captures (2020.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent success of pre-trained language models has spurred widespread interest in their capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation protocol that includes zero-shot evaluation and no fine-tuning . they propose to compare the learning curve of a fine- tuned LM to the learning of multiple controls . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation protocol compares the learning curve of a fine-tuned LM to the learning of multiple controls. |
Probing Pretrained Language Models for Lexical Semantics (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on morphosyntactic, semantic, and world knowledge, but it remains unclear to what extent LMs derive lexical type-level knowledge from words in context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual and monolingual LMs to extract lexical type-level knowledge from words in context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well across six typologically diverse languages and five lexical tasks. |
Do Language Models Perform Generalizable Commonsense Inference? (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has applied pretrained language models to populate commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs) but there is a lack of understanding on their generalization to multiple CKGs, unseen relations, and novel entities. |
| Approach: | They analyze the ability of pretrained language models to perform generalizable commonsense inference in terms of knowledge capacity, transferability and induction. |
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How Do Language Models Acquire Character-Level Information? (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) implicitly encode character-level information, despite not being explicitly provided during training. |
| Approach: | They analyze how language models acquire character-level knowledge by comparing them to standard settings. |
| Outcome: | The results show that LMs do not treat words as opaque tokens, but instead treat them as tokens. |
Generating Datasets with Pretrained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to obtain high-quality sentence embeddings from pretrained language models require labeled data or finetuned on large set of labeles. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generative abilities of large and high-performing PLMs to generate entire datasets of labeled text pairs from scratch and fine tune much smaller and more efficient models. |
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How Abstract Is Linguistic Generalization in Large Language Models? Experiments with Argument Structure (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Competent speakers of a language know how likely a word w is to appear in a specific context . |
| Approach: | They use transformer-based large language models to generalize a novel noun argument . they show a bias to generalise based on linear order, instead of a linear order . |
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Give Me the Facts! A Survey on Factual Knowledge Probing in Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are trained on vast unlabeled data, rich in world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a categorization scheme for factual probing methods based on how inputs, outputs and probed PLMs are adapted . they synthesize insights about knowledge retention and prompt optimization in PLM models and analyze obstacles to adopting them as knowledge bases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method synthesizes insights about knowledge retention and prompt optimization in PLMs, analyzes obstacles to adopting them as knowledge bases and outline directions for future work. |
A Close Look into the Calibration of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) may fail in giving reliable estimates of their predictive uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They conduct fine-grained control experiments to study the dynamic change in PLMs’ calibration performance in training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce PLMs’ confidence in wrong predictions. |