@inproceedings{tanzer-etal-2022-memorisation,
    title = "Memorisation versus Generalisation in Pre-trained Language Models",
    author = {T{\"a}nzer, Michael  and
      Ruder, Sebastian  and
      Rei, Marek},
    editor = "Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2022.acl-long.521/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.521",
    pages = "7564--7578",
    abstract = "State-of-the-art pre-trained language models have been shown to memorise facts and perform well with limited amounts of training data. To gain a better understanding of how these models learn, we study their generalisation and memorisation capabilities in noisy and low-resource scenarios. We find that the training of these models is almost unaffected by label noise and that it is possible to reach near-optimal results even on extremely noisy datasets. However, our experiments also show that they mainly learn from high-frequency patterns and largely fail when tested on low-resource tasks such as few-shot learning and rare entity recognition. To mitigate such limitations, we propose an extension based on prototypical networks that improves performance in low-resource named entity recognition tasks."
}