Language Models (LMs) become outdated as the world changes; they often fail to perform tasks requiring recent factual information which was absent or different during training, a phenomenon called temporal misalignment. This is especially a challenging problem because the research community still lacks a coherent dataset for assessing the adaptability of LMs to frequently-updated knowledge corpus such as Wikipedia. To this end, we introduce TemporalWiki, a lifelong benchmark for ever-evolving LMs that utilizes the difference between consecutive snapshots of English Wikipedia and English Wikidata for training and evaluation, respectively. The benchmark hence allows researchers to periodically track an LM’s ability to retain previous knowledge and acquire updated/new knowledge at each point in time. We also find that training an LM on the diff data through continual learning methods achieves similar or better perplexity than on the entire snapshot in our benchmark with 12 times less computational cost, which verifies that factual knowledge in LMs can be safely updated with minimal training data via continual learning.

Retrieval-based dialogue systems display an outstanding performance when pre-trained language models are used, which includes bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). During the multi-turn response selection, BERT focuses on training the relationship between the context with multiple utterances and the response. However, this method of training is insufficient when considering the relations between each utterance in the context. This leads to a problem of not completely understanding the context flow that is required to select a response. To address this issue, we propose a new fine-grained post-training method that reflects the characteristics of the multi-turn dialogue. Specifically, the model learns the utterance level interactions by training every short context-response pair in a dialogue session. Furthermore, by using a new training objective, the utterance relevance classification, the model understands the semantic relevance and coherence between the dialogue utterances. Experimental results show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art with significant margins on three benchmark datasets. This suggests that the fine-grained post-training method is highly effective for the response selection task.