TransPrompt: Towards an Automatic Transferable Prompting Framework for Few-shot Text Classification
Chengyu Wang, Jianing Wang, Minghui Qiu, Jun Huang, Ming Gao
Abstract
Recent studies have shown that prompts improve the performance of large pre-trained language models for few-shot text classification. Yet, it is unclear how the prompting knowledge can be transferred across similar NLP tasks for the purpose of mutual reinforcement. Based on continuous prompt embeddings, we propose TransPrompt, a transferable prompting framework for few-shot learning across similar tasks. In TransPrompt, we employ a multi-task meta-knowledge acquisition procedure to train a meta-learner that captures cross-task transferable knowledge. Two de-biasing techniques are further designed to make it more task-agnostic and unbiased towards any tasks. After that, the meta-learner can be adapted to target tasks with high accuracy. Extensive experiments show that TransPrompt outperforms single-task and cross-task strong baselines over multiple NLP tasks and datasets. We further show that the meta-learner can effectively improve the performance on previously unseen tasks; and TransPrompt also outperforms strong fine-tuning baselines when learning with full training sets.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.221
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2792–2802
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.221
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.221
- Cite (ACL):
- Chengyu Wang, Jianing Wang, Minghui Qiu, Jun Huang, and Ming Gao. 2021. TransPrompt: Towards an Automatic Transferable Prompting Framework for Few-shot Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2792–2802, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- TransPrompt: Towards an Automatic Transferable Prompting Framework for Few-shot Text Classification (Wang et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2021.emnlp-main.221.pdf
- Code
- wjn1996/TransPrompt + additional community code
- Data
- MR, MRPC, MultiNLI, SNLI, SST, SST-2