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SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans

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arxiv 1907.10529 v3 pith:XTYH5XQ6 submitted 2019-07-24 cs.CL cs.LG

SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans

classification cs.CL cs.LG
keywords spanspanbertspansbertcoreferencegainsmodelpre-training
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present SpanBERT, a pre-training method that is designed to better represent and predict spans of text. Our approach extends BERT by (1) masking contiguous random spans, rather than random tokens, and (2) training the span boundary representations to predict the entire content of the masked span, without relying on the individual token representations within it. SpanBERT consistently outperforms BERT and our better-tuned baselines, with substantial gains on span selection tasks such as question answering and coreference resolution. In particular, with the same training data and model size as BERT-large, our single model obtains 94.6% and 88.7% F1 on SQuAD 1.1 and 2.0, respectively. We also achieve a new state of the art on the OntoNotes coreference resolution task (79.6\% F1), strong performance on the TACRED relation extraction benchmark, and even show gains on GLUE.

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Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. ELECTRA: Pre-training Text Encoders as Discriminators Rather Than Generators

    cs.CL 2020-03 conditional novelty 8.0

    ELECTRA replaces masked language modeling with replaced token detection, yielding contextual representations that outperform BERT at equal compute and match larger models like RoBERTa with far less compute.

  2. REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training

    cs.CL 2020-02 accept novelty 8.0

    REALM augments language-model pre-training with an unsupervised retriever over Wikipedia documents and reports 4-16% absolute gains on open-domain QA benchmarks over prior implicit and explicit knowledge methods.

  3. BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension

    cs.CL 2019-10 accept novelty 7.0

    BART introduces a denoising pretraining method for seq2seq models that matches RoBERTa on GLUE and SQuAD while setting new state-of-the-art results on abstractive summarization, dialogue, and QA with up to 6 ROUGE gains.

  4. Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer

    cs.LG 2019-10 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    T5 casts all NLP tasks as text-to-text generation, systematically explores pre-training choices, and reaches strong performance on summarization, QA, classification and other tasks via large-scale training on the Colo...

  5. ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations

    cs.CL 2019-09 accept novelty 7.0

    ALBERT reduces BERT parameters via embedding factorization and layer sharing, adds inter-sentence coherence pretraining, and reaches SOTA on GLUE, RACE, and SQuAD with fewer parameters than BERT-large.

  6. Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism

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    Intra-layer model parallelism in PyTorch enables training of 8.3B-parameter transformers, achieving SOTA perplexity of 10.8 on WikiText103 and 66.5% accuracy on LAMBADA.

  7. HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing

    cs.CL 2019-10 accept novelty 6.0

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  8. RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach

    cs.CL 2019-07 accept novelty 5.0

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  9. PortBERT: Navigating the Depths of Portuguese Language Models

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    PortBERT releases two RoBERTa models for Portuguese that match or beat prior monolingual and multilingual models on translated GLUE/SuperGLUE tasks while reporting training and inference times.