English

Calibrating Factual Knowledge in Pretrained Language Models

Computation and Language 2022-10-19 v2

Abstract

Previous literature has proved that Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) can store factual knowledge. However, we find that facts stored in the PLMs are not always correct. It motivates us to explore a fundamental question: How do we calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch? In this work, we propose a simple and lightweight method CaliNet to achieve this goal. To be specific, we first detect whether PLMs can learn the right facts via a contrastive score between right and fake facts. If not, we then use a lightweight method to add and adapt new parameters to specific factual texts. Experiments on the knowledge probing task show the calibration effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, through closed-book question answering, we find that the calibrated PLM possesses knowledge generalization ability after fine-tuning. Beyond the calibration performance, we further investigate and visualize the knowledge calibration mechanism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.03329,
  title  = {Calibrating Factual Knowledge in Pretrained Language Models},
  author = {Qingxiu Dong and Damai Dai and Yifan Song and Jingjing Xu and Zhifang Sui and Lei Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03329},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted by Findings of EMNLP 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-28T02:58:45.521Z