How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model?

Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer


Abstract
It has recently been observed that neural language models trained on unstructured text can implicitly store and retrieve knowledge using natural language queries. In this short paper, we measure the practical utility of this approach by fine-tuning pre-trained models to answer questions without access to any external context or knowledge. We show that this approach scales with model size and performs competitively with open-domain systems that explicitly retrieve answers from an external knowledge source when answering questions. To facilitate reproducibility and future work, we release our code and trained models.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.437
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5418–5426
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.437
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.437
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel, and Noam Shazeer. 2020. How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model?. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5418–5426, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model? (Roberts et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.emnlp-main.437.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938651
Code
 google-research/google-research +  additional community code
Data
Natural QuestionsTriviaQAWebQuestions