Multi-Stage Pre-training for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation

Rong Zhang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Md Arafat Sultan, Vittorio Castelli, Anthony Ferritto, Radu Florian, Efsun Sarioglu Kayi, Salim Roukos, Avi Sil, Todd Ward


Abstract
Transfer learning techniques are particularly useful for NLP tasks where a sizable amount of high-quality annotated data is difficult to obtain. Current approaches directly adapt a pretrained language model (LM) on in-domain text before fine-tuning to downstream tasks. We show that extending the vocabulary of the LM with domain-specific terms leads to further gains. To a bigger effect, we utilize structure in the unlabeled data to create auxiliary synthetic tasks, which helps the LM transfer to downstream tasks. We apply these approaches incrementally on a pretrained Roberta-large LM and show considerable performance gain on three tasks in the IT domain: Extractive Reading Comprehension, Document Ranking and Duplicate Question Detection.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.440
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5461–5468
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.440
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.440
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rong Zhang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Md Arafat Sultan, Vittorio Castelli, Anthony Ferritto, Radu Florian, Efsun Sarioglu Kayi, Salim Roukos, Avi Sil, and Todd Ward. 2020. Multi-Stage Pre-training for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5461–5468, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Stage Pre-training for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2020.emnlp-main.440.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939045
Data
TechQA