Abstract
While behaviors of pretrained language models (LMs) have been thoroughly examined, what happened during pretraining is rarely studied. We thus investigate the developmental process from a set of randomly initialized parameters to a totipotent language model, which we refer to as the embryology of a pretrained language model. Our results show that ALBERT learns to reconstruct and predict tokens of different parts of speech (POS) in different learning speeds during pretraining. We also find that linguistic knowledge and world knowledge do not generally improve as pretraining proceeds, nor do downstream tasks’ performance. These findings suggest that knowledge of a pretrained model varies during pretraining, and having more pretrain steps does not necessarily provide a model with more comprehensive knowledge. We provide source codes and pretrained models to reproduce our results at https://github.com/d223302/albert-embryology.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.emnlp-main.553
- 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:
- 6813–6828
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.553
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.553
- Cite (ACL):
- Cheng-Han Chiang, Sung-Feng Huang, and Hung-yi Lee. 2020. Pretrained Language Model Embryology: The Birth of ALBERT. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 6813–6828, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Pretrained Language Model Embryology: The Birth of ALBERT (Chiang et al., EMNLP 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2020.emnlp-main.553.pdf
- Code
- d223302/albert-embryology
- Data
- GLUE, QNLI