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Revealing the Dark Secrets of BERT

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arxiv 1908.08593 v2 pith:ZLZNSMJ4 submitted 2019-08-21 cs.CL cs.LGstat.ML

Revealing the Dark Secrets of BERT

classification cs.CL cs.LGstat.ML
keywords bertheadsattentiondifferentperformancetasksacrosspatterns
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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BERT-based architectures currently give state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, but little is known about the exact mechanisms that contribute to its success. In the current work, we focus on the interpretation of self-attention, which is one of the fundamental underlying components of BERT. Using a subset of GLUE tasks and a set of handcrafted features-of-interest, we propose the methodology and carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the information encoded by the individual BERT's heads. Our findings suggest that there is a limited set of attention patterns that are repeated across different heads, indicating the overall model overparametrization. While different heads consistently use the same attention patterns, they have varying impact on performance across different tasks. We show that manually disabling attention in certain heads leads to a performance improvement over the regular fine-tuned BERT models.

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