English

Language Models as Knowledge Bases: On Entity Representations, Storage Capacity, and Paraphrased Queries

Computation and Language 2021-04-23 v2

Abstract

Pretrained language models have been suggested as a possible alternative or complement to structured knowledge bases. However, this emerging LM-as-KB paradigm has so far only been considered in a very limited setting, which only allows handling 21k entities whose single-token name is found in common LM vocabularies. Furthermore, the main benefit of this paradigm, namely querying the KB using a variety of natural language paraphrases, is underexplored so far. Here, we formulate two basic requirements for treating LMs as KBs: (i) the ability to store a large number facts involving a large number of entities and (ii) the ability to query stored facts. We explore three entity representations that allow LMs to represent millions of entities and present a detailed case study on paraphrased querying of world knowledge in LMs, thereby providing a proof-of-concept that language models can indeed serve as knowledge bases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.09036,
  title  = {Language Models as Knowledge Bases: On Entity Representations, Storage Capacity, and Paraphrased Queries},
  author = {Benjamin Heinzerling and Kentaro Inui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.09036},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

EACL 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:59:41.136Z