Give Me the Facts! A Survey on Factual Knowledge Probing in Pre-trained Language Models
Paul Youssef, Osman Koraş, Meijie Li, Jörg Schlötterer, Christin Seifert
Abstract
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on vast unlabeled data, rich in world knowledge. This fact has sparked the interest of the community in quantifying the amount of factual knowledge present in PLMs, as this explains their performance on downstream tasks, and potentially justifies their use as knowledge bases. In this work, we survey methods and datasets that are used to probe PLMs for factual knowledge. Our contributions are: (1) We propose a categorization scheme for factual probing methods that is based on how their inputs, outputs and the probed PLMs are adapted; (2) We provide an overview of the datasets used for factual probing; (3) We synthesize insights about knowledge retention and prompt optimization in PLMs, analyze obstacles to adopting PLMs as knowledge bases and outline directions for future work.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-emnlp.1043
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 15588–15605
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1043
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1043
- Cite (ACL):
- Paul Youssef, Osman Koraş, Meijie Li, Jörg Schlötterer, and Christin Seifert. 2023. Give Me the Facts! A Survey on Factual Knowledge Probing in Pre-trained Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15588–15605, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Give Me the Facts! A Survey on Factual Knowledge Probing in Pre-trained Language Models (Youssef et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/aacl-23-doi-ingestion/2023.findings-emnlp.1043.pdf