Papers with pre-training tasks
Prompt-based Zero-shot Text Classification with Conceptual Knowledge (2023.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pre-training language models rely on verbalizers to translate the predicted vocabulary to task-specific labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates conceptual knowledge for text classification in the extreme zero-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prompt-based approaches on four widely-used datasets for sentiment analysis and topic detection on the same experimental settings. |
SentiX: A Sentiment-Aware Pre-Trained Model for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to cross-domain NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, but fine-tuning them on the source domain tends to overfit, leading to inferior results on the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a sentiment-aware language model (SentiX) via domain-invariant sentiment knowledge from large-scale review datasets and utilize it for cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks without fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in all the cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks and can be trained with only 1% samples and better than BERT with 90% samples. |
Revisiting and Advancing Chinese Natural Language Understanding with Accelerated Heterogeneous Knowledge Pre-training (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Taolin Zhang, Junwei Dong, Jianing Wang, Chengyu Wang, Ang Wang, Yinghui Liu, Jun Huang, Yong Li, Xiaofeng He
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (KEPLMs) can capture internal knowledge, but can't understand external background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models to improve context-aware representations via learning from structured relations in knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models outperform strong baselines over various benchmark NLP tasks and in different model sizes. |
Rethinking Dictionaries and Glyphs for Chinese Language Pre-training (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and GPT have revolutionized various research fields in natural language processing (NLP) |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning paradigm that enhances the semantics understanding ability of Chinese PLMs with dictionary knowledge and structure of Chinese characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on both modern Chinese understanding benchmark CLUE and ancient Chinese understanding. |
MCP: Self-supervised Pre-training for Personalized Chatbots with Multi-level Contrastive Sampling (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on generating implicit user profiles from the user’s dialogue history, thus it suffers from data sparsity and performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised learning framework MCP for capturing better representations from users’ dialogue history for personalized chatbots. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two real-world datasets. |
A Self-supervised Joint Training Framework for Document Reranking (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have been successfully applied to a wide range of tasks . however, the pretraining tasks were based on the context of documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised joint training framework with a method called Masked Query Prediction to establish semantic relations between given queries and positive documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on document reranking tasks without further pre-training . it uses a self-supervised method to establish semantic relations between given queries and positive documents. |
A Domain Knowledge Enhanced Pre-Trained Language Model for Vertical Search: Case Study on Medicinal Products (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models lack medicinal product knowledge for product vertical search. |
| Approach: | They propose a biomedical knowledge enhanced pre-trained language model for medicinal product vertical search using ELECTRA’s replaced token detection (RTD) pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves query-title relevance, query intent classification, and named entity recognition in query. |
Structural Contrastive Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train multilingual language models using pretraining tasks like mask language modeling have yielded promising results on a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to align the structural words in a parallel sentence, enhancing models’ ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves model's ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations by increasing the frequency of negative pairings. |
HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | HERO is a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning that encodes multimodal inputs in a hierarchical structure and uses Masked Language Modeling and Masked Frame Modeling to train models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks over text-based video/video-moment retrieval, video question answering (QA), Video-and-language Inference and video Captioning tasks across different domains. |
Multi-stage Pre-training over Simplified Multimodal Pre-training Models (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal pre-training models require large amounts of training data and have huge model sizes, making them impossible to apply in low-resource situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage pre-training method which uses information at different granularities from word, phrase to sentence in both texts and images to pre-train a model in stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the original model in Image-Text Retrieval task and outperformed the original LXMERT model in downstream tasks. |
LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yang Xu, Yiheng Xu, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Furu Wei, Guoxin Wang, Yijuan Lu, Dinei Florencio, Cha Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Min Zhang, Lidong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training tasks for text and layout are effective in visually-rich document understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine pre-training tasks with a multi-modal model to model interaction between text, layout and image in a single multi-module framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin on visual-rich document understanding tasks. |
Training ELECTRA Augmented with Multi-word Selection (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods for NLP tasks require massive computation resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains a discriminator to detect replaced tokens and select original tokens from candidate sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ELECTRA based on multi-task learning on GLUE and SQUAD datasets. |
Breaking the Corpus Bottleneck for Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Cross-Task Pre-training (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale document-level parallel corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale parallel datasets and source-side monolingual documents to improve context-aware neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to translate both sentences and documents on four translation tasks. |
JointGT: Graph-Text Joint Representation Learning for Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models for knowledgegraph-to-text generation ignore graph structure during encoding and lack elaborate pre-training tasks to explicitly model graph-text alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-text joint representation learning model called JointGT which incorporates a structure-aware semantic aggregation module into each Transformer layer to preserve the graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on various KG-to-text datasets. |
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Heng Ji, Minlie Huang, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings. |
SpellBERT: A Lightweight Pretrained Model for Chinese Spelling Check (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese Spelling Check is a nontrivial task because of the nature of ideographic language. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained model with graph-based extra features that captures erroneous patterns . they use a graph neural network to introduce radical and pinyin information as visual and phonetic features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can show competitive performance on OCR datasets where most errors are not covered by existing confusion set. |
An Efficient Memory-Augmented Transformer for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on parametric models that store knowledge in parameters or retrieval-augmented models that have access to external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a parametric parametric model that stores knowledge in its parameters or a retrieval-augmented model that has access to external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method runs substantially faster across the board and produces more accurate results on WoW and ELI5. |
Making Language Models Robust Against Negation (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Negation is a semantic phenomenon that alters an expression to convey the opposite meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised method to make language models more robust against negation by pre-training models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms the off-the-shelf versions on nine negation-related benchmarks. |
XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zewen Chi, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Shuming Ma, Bo Zheng, Saksham Singhal, Payal Bajaj, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | ELECTRA-style tasks are used to pretrain cross-lingual models for NLP tasks . masked language modeling tasks require massive computation resources, rendering such models quite expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose to use ELECTRA-style tasks to pre-train a cross-lingual language model . they propose to pretrain the model on multilingual and parallel corpora . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cross-lingual understanding tasks with much less computation cost. |
Pre-training with Meta Learning for Chinese Word Segmentation (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained models are beneficial to Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS). However, these models lack task-specific prior segmentation knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained Chinese word segmentation model MetaSeg which incorporates meta learning into a multi-criteria pre-training task. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that MetaSeg can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on twelve widely-used CWS datasets and significantly improve model performance in low-resource settings. |
GAP: A Graph-aware Language Model Framework for Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent improvements in KG-to-text generation are due to additional pre-training tasks . these tasks require extensive computational resources while only suggesting marginal improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a mask structure to capture neighborhood information and a type encoder that adds a bias to the graph-attention weights depending on the connection type. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models while requiring no additional pre-training tasks. |
PPT: Pre-trained Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Learning (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning for pre-trained language models has shown remarkable performance . however, prompt tuning is still not fully explored . |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train prompts by adding soft prompts into the pre-training stage to obtain a better initialization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms full-model tuning under full-data and few-shot learning settings. |
Enhancing Numerical Reasoning with the Guidance of Reliable Reasoning Processes (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Numerical reasoning is an essential ability for NLP systems to handle numeric information. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical reasoning method that generates reliable reasoning processes by decomposing the answer formula and aim to train models to generate the process with synthesized data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on all five datasets with an average improvement of 1.8% compared with baselines and gpt-3.5-turbo. |
Is Language Modeling Enough? Evaluating Effective Embedding Combinations (2020.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
Rudolf Schneider, Tom Oberhauser, Paul Grundmann, Felix Alexander Gers, Alexander Loeser, Steffen Staab
| Challenge: | specialized embeddings are not available for tasks like entity linking or paragraph classification. |
| Approach: | They evaluate whether universal embeddings can be complemented by specialized embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed embeddings outperform state-of-the-art embeddables without any fine-tuning. |
Bootstrapped Pre-training with Dynamic Identifier Prediction for Generative Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document retrieval rely on static document identifiers . experimental results show that generative retrieval is outperforms dense retrieval in document retrievals. |
| Approach: | They propose a bootstrapped pre-training method that dynamically adjusts document identifiers during pre-train to accommodate the continuing memorization of the corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing pre-training generative retrieval baselines and performs well even in zero-shot settings. |
Code Membership Inference for Detecting Unauthorized Data Use in Code Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Code pre-trained language models (CPLMs) are trained on open-source code, raising concerns about data infringement. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for detecting unauthorized code use in CPLMs . they use signal extraction from pre-training tasks and weighted inference to identify code membership status accurately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects unauthorized code use with high accuracy. |
A Generative Pre-Trained Language Model for Channel Prediction in Wireless Communications Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Lin, Huanming Zhang, Yuhua Jiang, Yucong Wang, Tengyu Zhang, Shaoqiang Yan, Hongyao Li, Yihong Liu, Feifei Gao
| Challenge: | Existing model-based channel prediction methods suffer from limited accuracy due to imperfect temporal modeling, while existing AI-based methods suffers from limited generalization due to inadequate training strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative pre-trained language model for channel prediction based on channel correlation and train it based upon transformer decoder architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn various channel characteristics and perform impressive tasks across multiple dimensions. |
RSVP: Customer Intent Detection via Agent Response Contrastive and Generative Pre-Training (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing intent detection approaches have relied on adaptively pre-training language models with large-scale datasets, yet the predominant cost of data collection may hinder their superiority. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised framework dedicated to task-oriented dialogues which incorporates agent responses for pre-training in a two-stage manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art frameworks for task-oriented dialogues on two real-world customer service datasets. |
Incorporating Syntactic Knowledge into Pre-trained Language Model using Optimization for Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models lack syntactic knowledge for many tasks that handle complex or long sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained language models to incorporate syntactic knowledge into a model by adding additional syntatic knowledge to the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily applied to downstream tasks that require syntactic knowledge. |
LayoutMask: Enhance Text-Layout Interaction in Multi-modal Pre-training for Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models on document images with transformer-based backbones have led to significant performance gains in this field. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal pre-training model that combines text, layout and image . they propose to use local 1D position instead of global 1D positions as layout input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of VrDU problems. |