Do Long-Range Language Models Actually Use Long-Range Context?
Simeng Sun, Kalpesh Krishna, Andrew Mattarella-Micke, Mohit Iyyer
Abstract
Language models are generally trained on short, truncated input sequences, which limits their ability to use discourse-level information present in long-range context to improve their predictions. Recent efforts to improve the efficiency of self-attention have led to a proliferation of long-range Transformer language models, which can process much longer sequences than models of the past. However, the ways in which such models take advantage of the long-range context remain unclear. In this paper, we perform a fine-grained analysis of two long-range Transformer language models (including the Routing Transformer, which achieves state-of-the-art perplexity on the PG-19 long-sequence LM benchmark dataset) that accept input sequences of up to 8K tokens. Our results reveal that providing long-range context (i.e., beyond the previous 2K tokens) to these models only improves their predictions on a small set of tokens (e.g., those that can be copied from the distant context) and does not help at all for sentence-level prediction tasks. Finally, we discover that PG-19 contains a variety of different document types and domains, and that long-range context helps most for literary novels (as opposed to textbooks or magazines).- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.62
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 807–822
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.62
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.62
- Cite (ACL):
- Simeng Sun, Kalpesh Krishna, Andrew Mattarella-Micke, and Mohit Iyyer. 2021. Do Long-Range Language Models Actually Use Long-Range Context?. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 807–822, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Do Long-Range Language Models Actually Use Long-Range Context? (Sun et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2021.emnlp-main.62.pdf
- Data
- PG-19