Zero-Shot Learners for Natural Language Understanding via a Unified Multiple Choice Perspective

Ping Yang, Junjie Wang, Ruyi Gan, Xinyu Zhu, Lin Zhang, Ziwei Wu, Xinyu Gao, Jiaxing Zhang, Tetsuya Sakai


Abstract
We propose a new paradigm for zero-shot learners that is format agnostic, i.e., it is compatible with any format and applicable to a list of language tasks, such as text classification, commonsense reasoning, coreference resolution, and sentiment analysis. Zero-shot learning aims to train a model on a given task such that it can address new learning tasks without any additional training. Our approach converts zero-shot learning into multiple-choice tasks, avoiding problems in commonly used large-scale generative models such as FLAN. It not only adds generalization ability to models but also significantly reduces the number of parameters. Our method shares the merits of efficient training and deployment. Our approach shows state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and produces satisfactory results on tasks such as natural language inference and text classification. Our model achieves this success with only 235M parameters, which is substantially smaller than state-of-the-art models with billions of parameters. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-CCNL/Fengshenbang-LM/tree/main/fengshen/examples/unimc .
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.474
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7042–7055
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.474
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.474
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ping Yang, Junjie Wang, Ruyi Gan, Xinyu Zhu, Lin Zhang, Ziwei Wu, Xinyu Gao, Jiaxing Zhang, and Tetsuya Sakai. 2022. Zero-Shot Learners for Natural Language Understanding via a Unified Multiple Choice Perspective. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7042–7055, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-Shot Learners for Natural Language Understanding via a Unified Multiple Choice Perspective (Yang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.emnlp-main.474.pdf