13,023 research outputs found
Masked Language Model Scoring
Pretrained masked language models (MLMs) require finetuning for most NLP
tasks. Instead, we evaluate MLMs out of the box via their pseudo-log-likelihood
scores (PLLs), which are computed by masking tokens one by one. We show that
PLLs outperform scores from autoregressive language models like GPT-2 in a
variety of tasks. By rescoring ASR and NMT hypotheses, RoBERTa reduces an
end-to-end LibriSpeech model's WER by 30% relative and adds up to +1.7 BLEU on
state-of-the-art baselines for low-resource translation pairs, with further
gains from domain adaptation. We attribute this success to PLL's unsupervised
expression of linguistic acceptability without a left-to-right bias, greatly
improving on scores from GPT-2 (+10 points on island effects, NPI licensing in
BLiMP). One can finetune MLMs to give scores without masking, enabling
computation in a single inference pass. In all, PLLs and their associated
pseudo-perplexities (PPPLs) enable plug-and-play use of the growing number of
pretrained MLMs; e.g., we use a single cross-lingual model to rescore
translations in multiple languages. We release our library for language model
scoring at https://github.com/awslabs/mlm-scoring.Comment: ACL 2020 camera-ready (presented July 2020
Domain Adaptation for Statistical Classifiers
The most basic assumption used in statistical learning theory is that
training data and test data are drawn from the same underlying distribution.
Unfortunately, in many applications, the "in-domain" test data is drawn from a
distribution that is related, but not identical, to the "out-of-domain"
distribution of the training data. We consider the common case in which labeled
out-of-domain data is plentiful, but labeled in-domain data is scarce. We
introduce a statistical formulation of this problem in terms of a simple
mixture model and present an instantiation of this framework to maximum entropy
classifiers and their linear chain counterparts. We present efficient inference
algorithms for this special case based on the technique of conditional
expectation maximization. Our experimental results show that our approach leads
to improved performance on three real world tasks on four different data sets
from the natural language processing domain
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