English

Can ChatGPT Understand Too? A Comparative Study on ChatGPT and Fine-tuned BERT

Computation and Language 2023-03-03 v2

Abstract

Recently, ChatGPT has attracted great attention, as it can generate fluent and high-quality responses to human inquiries. Several prior studies have shown that ChatGPT attains remarkable generation ability compared with existing models. However, the quantitative analysis of ChatGPT's understanding ability has been given little attention. In this report, we explore the understanding ability of ChatGPT by evaluating it on the most popular GLUE benchmark, and comparing it with 4 representative fine-tuned BERT-style models. We find that: 1) ChatGPT falls short in handling paraphrase and similarity tasks; 2) ChatGPT outperforms all BERT models on inference tasks by a large margin; 3) ChatGPT achieves comparable performance compared with BERT on sentiment analysis and question-answering tasks. Additionally, by combining some advanced prompting strategies, we show that the understanding ability of ChatGPT can be further improved.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.10198,
  title  = {Can ChatGPT Understand Too? A Comparative Study on ChatGPT and Fine-tuned BERT},
  author = {Qihuang Zhong and Liang Ding and Juhua Liu and Bo Du and Dacheng Tao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.10198},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Work in progress. Added results of advanced prompting strategies, e.g., CoT. (19 pages)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:44:52.345Z