Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding

Yu Zhang, Hao Cheng, Zhihong Shen, Xiaodong Liu, Ye-Yi Wang, Jianfeng Gao


Abstract
Scientific literature understanding tasks have gained significant attention due to their potential to accelerate scientific discovery. Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in these tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. However, jointly utilizing pre-training data across multiple heterogeneous tasks (e.g., extreme multi-label paper classification, citation prediction, and literature search) remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework, SciMult, with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. To be specific, we explore two techniques – task-aware specialization and instruction tuning. The former adopts a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture with task-aware sub-layers; the latter prepends task-specific instructions to the input text so as to produce task-aware outputs. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive collection of benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our task-aware specialization strategy, where we outperform state-of-the-art scientific pre-trained LMs. Code, datasets, and pre-trained models can be found at https://scimult.github.io/.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.820
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12259–12275
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.820
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.820
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Zhang, Hao Cheng, Zhihong Shen, Xiaodong Liu, Ye-Yi Wang, and Jianfeng Gao. 2023. Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 12259–12275, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2023.findings-emnlp.820.pdf