The large scale of pre-trained language models poses a challenge for their deployment on various devices, with a growing emphasis on methods to compress these models, particularly knowledge distillation. However, current knowledge distillation methods rely on the model’s intermediate layer features and the golden labels (also called hard labels), which usually require aligned model architecture and enough labeled data respectively. Moreover, the parameters of vocabulary are usually neglected in existing methods. To address these problems, we propose a general language model distillation (GLMD) method that performs two-stage word prediction distillation and vocabulary compression, which is simple and surprisingly shows extremely strong performance. Specifically, GLMD supports more general application scenarios by eliminating the constraints of dimension and structure between models and the need for labeled datasets through the absence of intermediate layers and golden labels. Meanwhile, based on the long-tailed distribution of word frequencies in the data, GLMD designs a strategy of vocabulary compression through decreasing vocabulary size instead of dimensionality. Experimental results show that our method outperforms 25 state-of-the-art methods on the SuperGLUE benchmark, achieving an average score that surpasses the best method by 3%.

Prompt tuning attempts to update few task-specific parameters in pre-trained models. It has achieved comparable performance to fine-tuning of the full parameter set on both language understanding and generation tasks. In this work, we study the problem of prompt tuning for neural text retrievers. We introduce parameter-efficient prompt tuning for text retrieval across in-domain, cross-domain, and cross-topic settings. Through an extensive analysis, we show that the strategy can mitigate the two issues—parameter-inefficiency and weak generalizability—faced by fine-tuning based retrieval methods. Notably, it can significantly improve the out-of-domain zero-shot generalization of the retrieval models. By updating only 0.1% of the model parameters, the prompt tuning strategy can help retrieval models achieve better generalization performance than traditional methods in which all parameters are updated. Finally, to facilitate research on retrievers’ cross-topic generalizability, we curate and release an academic retrieval dataset with 18K query-results pairs in 87 topics, making it the largest topic-specific one to date.

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is currently an open question. Automatic evaluation metrics have shown poor correlation with human assessment in dialogue generation tasks. Human evaluation, which involves annotators for multi-dimension scoring, is trustworthy but time-consuming. In this work, we propose FFAEval, a reliable and efficient human evaluation framework using Free-For-All ranking approach. By sharing the dialogue history, the framework enables annotators to converse with multiple dialogue systems simultaneously in a single-blind, multi-turn manner. The subsequent free-for-all allows annotators to select the most favourable model in each turn from among all the participating dialogue systems. The final performance of each model is represented by calculating the TrueSkill score derived from the free-for-all competition. Our empirical study on English and Chinese dialogue systems demonstrates that FFAEval achieves a strong correlation with score-based human assessment compared to existing evaluation methods. We further prove the efficiency and stability of our framework in additional experiments. The source code and data are available on Github.

Currently, the reduction in the parameter scale of large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) through knowledge distillation has greatly facilitated their widespread deployment on various devices. However, the deployment of knowledge distillation systems faces great challenges in real-world industrial-strength applications, which require the use of complex distillation methods on even larger-scale PLMs (over 10B), limited by memory on GPUs and the switching of methods. To overcome these challenges, we propose GKD, a general knowledge distillation framework that supports distillation on larger-scale PLMs using various distillation methods. With GKD, developers can build larger distillation models on memory-limited GPUs and easily switch and combine different distillation methods within a single framework. Experimental results show that GKD can support the distillation of at least 100B-scale PLMs and 25 mainstream methods on 8 NVIDIA A100 (40GB) GPUs.

We introduce a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models. Unlike previous approaches that finetune the models with task-specific augmentation, we pretrain language models to generate structures from the text on a collection of task-agnostic corpora. Our structure pretraining enables zero-shot transfer of the learned knowledge that models have about the structure tasks. We study the performance of this approach on 28 datasets, spanning 10 structure prediction tasks including open information extraction, joint entity and relation extraction, named entity recognition, relation classification, semantic role labeling, event extraction, coreference resolution, factual probe, intent detection, and dialogue state tracking. We further enhance the pretraining with the task-specific training sets. We show that a 10B parameter language model transfers non-trivially to most tasks and obtains state-of-the-art performance on 21 of 28 datasets that we evaluate. Our code and datasets will be made publicly available.

There have been various types of pretraining architectures including autoencoding models (e.g., BERT), autoregressive models (e.g., GPT), and encoder-decoder models (e.g., T5). However, none of the pretraining frameworks performs the best for all tasks of three main categories including natural language understanding (NLU), unconditional generation, and conditional generation. We propose a General Language Model (GLM) based on autoregressive blank infilling to address this challenge. GLM improves blank filling pretraining by adding 2D positional encodings and allowing an arbitrary order to predict spans, which results in performance gains over BERT and T5 on NLU tasks. Meanwhile, GLM can be pretrained for different types of tasks by varying the number and lengths of blanks. On a wide range of tasks across NLU, conditional and unconditional generation, GLM outperforms BERT, T5, and GPT given the same model sizes and data, and achieves the best performance from a single pretrained model with 1.25× parameters of BERT Large , demonstrating its generalizability to different downstream tasks.

The few-shot natural language understanding (NLU) task has attracted much recent attention. However, prior methods have been evaluated under a disparate set of protocols, which hinders fair comparison and measuring the progress of the field. To address this issue, we introduce an evaluation framework that improves previous evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., test performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. Under this new evaluation framework, we re-evaluate several state-of-the-art few-shot methods for NLU tasks. Our framework reveals new insights: (1) both the absolute performance and relative gap of the methods were not accurately estimated in prior literature; (2) no single method dominates most tasks with consistent performance; (3) improvements of some methods diminish with a larger pretrained model; and (4) gains from different methods are often complementary and the best combined model performs close to a strong fully-supervised baseline. We open-source our toolkit, FewNLU, that implements our evaluation framework along with a number of state-of-the-art methods.

Recent works on knowledge base question answering (KBQA) retrieve subgraphs for easier reasoning. The desired subgraph is crucial as a small one may exclude the answer but a large one might introduce more noises. However, the existing retrieval is either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs, which increases the reasoning bias when the intermediate supervision is missing. This paper proposes a trainable subgraph retriever (SR) decoupled from the subsequent reasoning process, which enables a plug-and-play framework to enhance any subgraph-oriented KBQA model. Extensive experiments demonstrate SR achieves significantly better retrieval and QA performance than existing retrieval methods. Via weakly supervised pre-training as well as the end-to-end fine-tuning, SR achieves new state-of-the-art performance when combined with NSM (He et al., 2021), a subgraph-oriented reasoner, for embedding-based KBQA methods. Codes and datasets are available online (https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/SubgraphRetrievalKBQA)

Most previous methods for text data augmentation are limited to simple tasks and weak baselines. We explore data augmentation on hard tasks (i.e., few-shot natural language understanding) and strong baselines (i.e., pretrained models with over one billion parameters). Under this setting, we reproduced a large number of previous augmentation methods and found that these methods bring marginal gains at best and sometimes degrade the performance much. To address this challenge, we propose a novel data augmentation method FlipDA that jointly uses a generative model and a classifier to generate label-flipped data. Central to the idea of FlipDA is the discovery that generating label-flipped data is more crucial to the performance than generating label-preserved data. Experiments show that FlipDA achieves a good tradeoff between effectiveness and robustness—it substantially improves many tasks while not negatively affecting the others.

Prompt tuning, which only tunes continuous prompts with a frozen language model, substantially reduces per-task storage and memory usage at training. However, in the context of NLU, prior work reveals that prompt tuning does not perform well for normal-sized pretrained models. We also find that existing methods of prompt tuning cannot handle hard sequence labeling tasks, indicating a lack of universality. We present a novel empirical finding that properly optimized prompt tuning can be universally effective across a wide range of model scales and NLU tasks. It matches the performance of finetuning while having only 0.1%-3% tuned parameters. Our method P-Tuning v2 is an implementation of Deep Prompt Tuning (CITATION) optimized and adapted for NLU. Given the universality and simplicity of P-Tuning v2, we believe it can serve as an alternative to finetuning and a strong baseline for future research.

We investigate the usage of entity linking (EL)in downstream tasks and present the first modularized EL toolkit for easy task adaptation. Different from the existing EL methods that dealwith all the features simultaneously, we modularize the whole model into separate parts witheach feature. This decoupled design enablesflexibly adding new features without retraining the whole model as well as flow visualization with better interpretability of the ELresult. We release the corresponding toolkit,HOSMEL, for Chinese, with three flexible usage modes, a live demo, and a demonstrationvideo. Experiments on two benchmarks forthe question answering task demonstrate thatHOSMEL achieves much less time and spaceconsumption as well as significantly better accuracy performance compared with existingSOTA EL methods. We hope the release ofHOSMEL will call for more attention to studyEL for downstream tasks in non-English languages.

In recent years, pretrained models revolutionized the paradigm of natural language understanding (NLU), where we append a randomly initialized classification head after the pretrained backbone, e.g. BERT, and finetune the whole model. As the pretrained backbone makes a major contribution to the improvement, we naturally expect a good pretrained classification head can also benefit the training. However, the final-layer output of the backbone, i.e. the input of the classification head, will change greatly during finetuning, making the usual head-only pretraining ineffective. In this paper, we find that parameter-efficient tuning makes a good classification head, with which we can simply replace the randomly initialized heads for a stable performance gain. Our experiments demonstrate that the classification head jointly pretrained with parameter-efficient tuning consistently improves the performance on 9 tasks in GLUE and SuperGLUE.

We cast a suite of information extraction tasks into a text-to-triple translation framework. Instead of solving each task relying on task-specific datasets and models, we formalize the task as a translation between task-specific input text and output triples. By taking the task-specific input, we enable a task-agnostic translation by leveraging the latent knowledge that a pre-trained language model has about the task. We further demonstrate that a simple pre-training task of predicting which relational information corresponds to which input text is an effective way to produce task-specific outputs. This enables the zero-shot transfer of our framework to downstream tasks. We study the zero-shot performance of this framework on open information extraction (OIE2016, NYT, WEB, PENN), relation classification (FewRel and TACRED), and factual probe (Google-RE and T-REx). The model transfers non-trivially to most tasks and is often competitive with a fully supervised method without the need for any task-specific training. For instance, we significantly outperform the F1 score of the supervised open information extraction without needing to use its training set.

Within the prosperity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the education applications that automatically provide extracurricular knowledge for MOOC users become rising research topics. However, MOOC courses’ diversity and rapid updates make it more challenging to find suitable new knowledge for students. In this paper, we present ExpanRL, an end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) model for concept expansion in MOOCs. Employing a two-level HRL mechanism of seed selection and concept expansion, ExpanRL is more feasible to adjust the expansion strategy to find new concepts based on the students’ feedback on expansion results. Our experiments on nine novel datasets from real MOOCs show that ExpanRL achieves significant improvements over existing methods and maintain competitive performance under different settings.

We present BlockBERT, a lightweight and efficient BERT model for better modeling long-distance dependencies. Our model extends BERT by introducing sparse block structures into the attention matrix to reduce both memory consumption and training/inference time, which also enables attention heads to capture either short- or long-range contextual information. We conduct experiments on language model pre-training and several benchmark question answering datasets with various paragraph lengths. BlockBERT uses 18.7-36.1% less memory and 12.0-25.1% less time to learn the model. During testing, BlockBERT saves 27.8% inference time, while having comparable and sometimes better prediction accuracy, compared to an advanced BERT-based model, RoBERTa.

The prosperity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provides fodder for many NLP and AI research for education applications, e.g., course concept extraction, prerequisite relation discovery, etc. However, the publicly available datasets of MOOC are limited in size with few types of data, which hinders advanced models and novel attempts in related topics. Therefore, we present MOOCCube, a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource. Moreover, we conduct a prerequisite discovery task as an example application to show the potential of MOOCCube in facilitating relevant research. The data repository is now available at http://moocdata.cn/data/MOOCCube.

We propose a new CogQA framework for multi-hop reading comprehension question answering in web-scale documents. Founded on the dual process theory in cognitive science, the framework gradually builds a cognitive graph in an iterative process by coordinating an implicit extraction module (System 1) and an explicit reasoning module (System 2). While giving accurate answers, our framework further provides explainable reasoning paths. Specifically, our implementation based on BERT and graph neural network efficiently handles millions of documents for multi-hop reasoning questions in the HotpotQA fullwiki dataset, achieving a winning joint F₁ score of 34.9 on the leaderboard, compared to 23.1 of the best competitor.

As Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) become increasingly popular, it is promising to automatically provide extracurricular knowledge for MOOC users. Suffering from semantic drifts and lack of knowledge guidance, existing methods can not effectively expand course concepts in complex MOOC environments. In this paper, we first build a novel boundary during searching for new concepts via external knowledge base and then utilize heterogeneous features to verify the high-quality results. In addition, to involve human efforts in our model, we design an interactive optimization mechanism based on a game. Our experiments on the four datasets from Coursera and XuetangX show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements(+0.19 by MAP) over existing methods.

In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework called KBRD, which stands for Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System. It integrates the recommender system and the dialog generation system. The dialog generation system can enhance the performance of the recommendation system by introducing information about users’ preferences, and the recommender system can improve that of the dialog generation system by providing recommendation-aware vocabulary bias. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model has significant advantages over the baselines in both the evaluation of dialog generation and recommendation. A series of analyses show that the two systems can bring mutual benefits to each other, and the introduced knowledge contributes to both their performances.

What prerequisite knowledge should students achieve a level of mastery before moving forward to learn subsequent coursewares? We study the extent to which the prerequisite relation between knowledge concepts in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can be inferred automatically. In particular, what kinds of information can be leverage to uncover the potential prerequisite relation between knowledge concepts. We first propose a representation learning-based method for learning latent representations of course concepts, and then investigate how different features capture the prerequisite relations between concepts. Our experiments on three datasets form Coursera show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements (+5.9-48.0% by F1-score) comparing with existing methods.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), offering a new way to study online, are revolutionizing education. One challenging issue in MOOCs is how to design effective and fine-grained course concepts such that students with different backgrounds can grasp the essence of the course. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of the problem of course concept extraction for MOOCs. We propose to learn latent representations for candidate concepts via an embedding-based method. Moreover, we develop a graph-based propagation algorithm to rank the candidate concepts based on the learned representations. We evaluate the proposed method using different courses from XuetangX and Coursera. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms all the alternative methods (+0.013-0.318 in terms of R-precision; p<<0.01, t-test).