When applied to processing long text, Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited by their context window. Existing efforts to address this limitation involve training specialized architectures, and cannot be easily applied to off- the-shelf LLMs. We present Parallel Context Windows (PCW), a method that alleviates the context window restriction for any off-the-shelf LLM without further training. The key to the approach is to carve a long context into chunks (“windows”), restrict the attention mechanism to apply only within each window, and re-use the positional embeddings across the windows. Our main results test the PCW approach on in-context learning with models that range in size between 750 million and 178 billion parameters, and show substantial improvements for tasks with diverse input and output spaces. We show additional benefits in other settings where long context windows may be beneficial: multi-hop questions and retrieval-augmented question answering with multiple retrieved documents. Our results highlight Parallel Context Windows as a promising method for applying off-the-shelf LLMs in a range of settings that require long text sequences. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ai21labs/parallel-context-windows.

Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) methods, which condition a language model (LM) on relevant documents from a grounding corpus during generation, were shown to significantly improve language modeling performance. In addition, they can mitigate the problem of factually inaccurate text generation and provide natural source attribution mechanism. Existing RALM approaches focus on modifying the LM architecture in order to facilitate the incorporation of external information, significantly complicating deployment. This paper considers a simple alternative, which we dub In-Context RALM: leaving the LM architecture unchanged and prepending grounding documents to the input, without any further training of the LM. We show that In-Context RALM that builds on off-the-shelf general purpose retrievers provides surprisingly large LM gains across model sizes and diverse corpora. We also demonstrate that the document retrieval and ranking mechanism can be specialized to the RALM setting to further boost performance. We conclude that In-Context RALM has considerable potential to increase the prevalence of LM grounding, particularly in settings where a pretrained LM must be used without modification or even via API access.1

The ability to learn from large unlabeled corpora has allowed neural language models to advance the frontier in natural language understanding. However, existing self-supervision techniques operate at the word form level, which serves as a surrogate for the underlying semantic content. This paper proposes a method to employ weak-supervision directly at the word sense level. Our model, named SenseBERT, is pre-trained to predict not only the masked words but also their WordNet supersenses. Accordingly, we attain a lexical-semantic level language model, without the use of human annotation. SenseBERT achieves significantly improved lexical understanding, as we demonstrate by experimenting on SemEval Word Sense Disambiguation, and by attaining a state of the art result on the ‘Word in Context’ task.