ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding
Dongling Xiao, Yu-Kun Li, Han Zhang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Abstract
Coarse-grained linguistic information, such as named entities or phrases, facilitates adequately representation learning in pre-training. Previous works mainly focus on extending the objective of BERT’s Masked Language Modeling (MLM) from masking individual tokens to contiguous sequences of n tokens. We argue that such contiguously masking method neglects to model the intra-dependencies and inter-relation of coarse-grained linguistic information. As an alternative, we propose ERNIE-Gram, an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance the integration of coarse-grained information into pre-training. In ERNIE-Gram, n-grams are masked and predicted directly using explicit n-gram identities rather than contiguous sequences of n tokens. Furthermore, ERNIE-Gram employs a generator model to sample plausible n-gram identities as optional n-gram masks and predict them in both coarse-grained and fine-grained manners to enable comprehensive n-gram prediction and relation modeling. We pre-train ERNIE-Gram on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tune on 19 downstream tasks. Experimental results show that ERNIE-Gram outperforms previous pre-training models like XLNet and RoBERTa by a large margin, and achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.naacl-main.136
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1702–1715
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.136
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.136
- Cite (ACL):
- Dongling Xiao, Yu-Kun Li, Han Zhang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, and Haifeng Wang. 2021. ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1702–1715, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (Xiao et al., NAACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.naacl-main.136.pdf
- Code
- PaddlePaddle/PaddleNLP + additional community code
- Data
- CMRC, CMRC 2018, CoLA, DRCD, DuReader, GLUE, IMDb Movie Reviews, MRPC, MultiNLI, QNLI, RACE, SQuAD, SST