Challenge: a recent study suggests that masked language models are a useful pre-training technique for natural language processing . a study using mlms pre-trained by a team of researchers has improved performance .
Approach: They propose an alternative to the classic masked language modeling paradigm . they use an unsupervised technique which uses sparse coding to make the prediction possible .
Outcome: The proposed technique improves on pre-trained models compared to vanilla MLM . the proposed model returns distributions over their vocabulary peaking at plausible substitutes .

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Frustratingly Simple Pretraining Alternatives to Masked Language Modeling (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Masked language modeling (MLM) is widely used in natural language processing for self-supervised learning of text representations.
Approach: They propose to use token-level classification tasks as main pretraining objectives instead of Masked language modeling (MLM) . Empirical results show that pretraining a model with 41% of the BERT-BASE’s parameters, BERT MEDIUM results in only a 1% drop in GLUE scores with their best objective.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed methods achieve comparable or better performance to MLM using a BERT-BASE architecture.
Efficient Pre-training of Masked Language Model via Concept-based Curriculum Masking (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Masked language modeling (MLM) has been widely used for pre-training effective bidirectional representations but comes at a substantial training cost.
Approach: They propose a concept-based curriculum masking method that evaluates the MLM difficulty of each token based on a carefully-designed linguistic difficulty criterion.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves pre-training efficiency with the original BERT model at half the training cost.
Mask More and Mask Later: Efficient Pre-training of Masked Language Models by Disentangling the [MASK] Token (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large-scale pre-trained MLMs can be used to generalize well to a wide range of tasks.
Approach: They propose to append [MASK]s at a later layer to reduce sequence length for earlier layers.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms RoBERTa for 6 out of 8 GLUE tasks on average by 0.4%.
DMLM: Descriptive Masked Language Modeling (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Descriptive Masked Language Modeling (DMLM) is a knowledge-enhanced reading comprehension objective that requires the model to predict the most likely word in a context, being provided with the word’s definition.
Approach: They propose a knowledge-enhanced reading comprehension objective where the model is required to predict the most likely word in a context, being provided with the word’s definition.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on a number of well-established NLU benchmarks and other semantic-focused tasks, e.g., Semantic Role Labeling.
Masking as an Efficient Alternative to Finetuning for Pretrained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Extensive evaluations of masking BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT on eleven diverse NLP tasks show that our binary masked language models encode information necessary for solving downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models where selective binary masks are learned instead of finetuning.
Outcome: Extensive evaluations of masking BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT on eleven diverse NLP tasks show that the proposed method yields comparable performance to finetuning, but has a much smaller memory footprint when multiple tasks need to be solved.
Data Efficient Masked Language Modeling for Vision and Language (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Masked language modeling (MLM) is one of the key sub-tasks in vision-language pretraining.
Approach: They propose a masking strategy that masks tokens with a 15% probability for text-only data.
Outcome: The proposed masking strategy outperforms the baseline model on a prompt-based probing task designed to elicit image objects.
Does Masked Language Model Pre-training with Artificial Data Improve Low-resource Neural Machine Translation? (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Pre-training masked language models with artificial data has been proven beneficial for several natural language processing tasks, however, it has been less explored for neural machine translation (NMT).
Approach: They pre-trained masked language models with random sequences and created artificial data mimicking token frequency information from the real world.
Outcome: The results show that pre-training models with artificial data improves translation performance in low-resource situations.
NB-MLM: Efficient Domain Adaptation of Masked Language Models for Sentiment Analysis (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Pre-training Masked Language Models (MLMs) on massive datasets is expensive, but it is performed for each domain or task individually and is resource-demanding.
Approach: They propose a method for more efficient adaptation that focuses on predicting words with large weights of the Naive Bayes classifier trained for the task at hand.
Outcome: The proposed method improves sentiment analysis by focusing on predicting words with large weights of the Naive Bayes classifier trained for the task at hand.
ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training.
Approach: They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks.
Improving Pretraining Techniques for Code-Switched NLP (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multilingual pretraining models for code-switched inputs are a key component of NLP applications.
Approach: They propose to use masked language modeling techniques to mask code-switched text that are cognizant of language boundaries prior to masking.
Outcome: The proposed techniques improve performance on two downstream tasks, Question Answering (QA) and Sentiment Analysis (SA), compared to standard pretraining techniques.

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