In plain words: Instead of teaching a language model only which words go together, this system keeps adding practice tasks—like spotting names and linking related sentences—and trains on all at once. It beat the usual pre-trained models BERT and XLNet on 16 English and Chinese tasks.
Abstract · ERNIE 2.0: A Continual Pre-training Framework for Language Understanding
Recently, pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various language understanding tasks, which indicates that pre-training on large-scale corpora may play a crucial role in natural language processing. Current pre-training procedures usually focus on training the model with several simple tasks to grasp the co-occurrence of words or sentences. However, besides co-occurring, there exists other valuable lexical, syntactic and semantic information in training corpora, such as named entity, semantic closeness and discourse relations. In order to extract to the fullest extent, the lexical, syntactic and semantic information from training corpora, we propose a continual pre-training framework named ERNIE 2.0 which builds and learns incrementally pre-training tasks through constant multi-task learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE 2.0 outperforms BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks including English tasks on GLUE benchmarks and several common tasks in Chinese. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.
Yu Sun, Shuohuan Wang, Yukun Li, Shikun Feng, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
arXiv:1907.12412 · cs.CL · submitted Jul 29, 2019 · updated Nov 21, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 11 pages, 3 figures and 7 tables; Accepted by AAAI 2020