Dynamic Benchmarking of Masked Language Models on Temporal Concept Drift with Multiple Views

Katerina Margatina, Shuai Wang, Yogarshi Vyas, Neha Anna John, Yassine Benajiba, Miguel Ballesteros


Abstract
Temporal concept drift refers to the problem of data changing over time. In the field of NLP, that would entail that language (e.g. new expressions, meaning shifts) and factual knowledge (e.g. new concepts, updated facts) evolve over time. Focusing on the latter, we benchmark 11 pretrained masked language models (MLMs) on a series of tests designed to evaluate the effect of temporal concept drift, as it is crucial that widely used language models remain up-to-date with the ever-evolving factual updates of the real world. Specifically, we provide a holistic framework that (1) dynamically creates temporal test sets of any time granularity (e.g. month, quarter, year) of factual data from Wikidata, (2) constructs fine-grained splits of tests (e.g. updated, new, unchanged facts) to ensure comprehensive analysis, and (3) evaluates MLMs in three distinct ways (single-token probing, multi-token generation, MLM scoring). In contrast to prior work, our framework aims to unveil how robust an MLM is over time and thus to provide a signal in case it has become outdated, by leveraging multiple views of evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.211
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2881–2898
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.211
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.211
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Katerina Margatina, Shuai Wang, Yogarshi Vyas, Neha Anna John, Yassine Benajiba, and Miguel Ballesteros. 2023. Dynamic Benchmarking of Masked Language Models on Temporal Concept Drift with Multiple Views. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2881–2898, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dynamic Benchmarking of Masked Language Models on Temporal Concept Drift with Multiple Views (Margatina et al., EACL 2023)
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