TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models

Joel Jang, Seonghyeon Ye, Changho Lee, Sohee Yang, Joongbo Shin, Janghoon Han, Gyeonghun Kim, Minjoon Seo


Abstract
Language Models (LMs) become outdated as the world changes; they often fail to perform tasks requiring recent factual information which was absent or different during training, a phenomenon called temporal misalignment. This is especially a challenging problem because the research community still lacks a coherent dataset for assessing the adaptability of LMs to frequently-updated knowledge corpus such as Wikipedia. To this end, we introduce TemporalWiki, a lifelong benchmark for ever-evolving LMs that utilizes the difference between consecutive snapshots of English Wikipedia and English Wikidata for training and evaluation, respectively. The benchmark hence allows researchers to periodically track an LM’s ability to retain previous knowledge and acquire updated/new knowledge at each point in time. We also find that training an LM on the diff data through continual learning methods achieves similar or better perplexity than on the entire snapshot in our benchmark with 12 times less computational cost, which verifies that factual knowledge in LMs can be safely updated with minimal training data via continual learning.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.418
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6237–6250
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.418
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.418
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joel Jang, Seonghyeon Ye, Changho Lee, Sohee Yang, Joongbo Shin, Janghoon Han, Gyeonghun Kim, and Minjoon Seo. 2022. TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6237–6250, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models (Jang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.emnlp-main.418.pdf