@inproceedings{heinzerling-inui-2021-language,
    title = "Language Models as Knowledge Bases: On Entity Representations, Storage Capacity, and Paraphrased Queries",
    author = "Heinzerling, Benjamin  and
      Inui, Kentaro",
    editor = "Merlo, Paola  and
      Tiedemann, Jorg  and
      Tsarfaty, Reut",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume",
    month = apr,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.eacl-main.153/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.153",
    pages = "1772--1791",
    abstract = "Pretrained language models have been suggested as a possible alternative or complement to structured knowledge bases. However, this emerging LM-as-KB paradigm has so far only been considered in a very limited setting, which only allows handling 21k entities whose name is found in common LM vocabularies. Furthermore, a major benefit of this paradigm, i.e., querying the KB using natural language paraphrases, is underexplored. Here we formulate two basic requirements for treating LMs as KBs: (i) the ability to store a large number facts involving a large number of entities and (ii) the ability to query stored facts. We explore three entity representations that allow LMs to handle millions of entities and present a detailed case study on paraphrased querying of facts stored in LMs, thereby providing a proof-of-concept that language models can indeed serve as knowledge bases."
}