@inproceedings{kao-lee-2021-bert-cross,
    title = "Is {BERT} a Cross-Disciplinary Knowledge Learner? A Surprising Finding of Pre-trained Models' Transferability",
    author = "Kao, Wei-Tsung  and
      Lee, Hung-yi",
    editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine  and
      Huang, Xuanjing  and
      Specia, Lucia  and
      Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.findings-emnlp.189/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.189",
    pages = "2195--2208",
    abstract = "This paper investigates whether the power of the models pre-trained on text data, such as BERT, can be transferred to general token sequence classification applications. To verify pre-trained models' transferability, we test the pre-trained models on text classification tasks with meanings of tokens mismatches, and real-world non-text token sequence classification data, including amino acid, DNA, and music. We find that even on non-text data, the models pre-trained on text converge faster, perform better than the randomly initialized models, and only slightly worse than the models using task-specific knowledge. We also find that the representations of the text and non-text pre-trained models share non-trivial similarities."
}