English

Mean BERTs make erratic language teachers: the effectiveness of latent bootstrapping in low-resource settings

Computation and Language 2023-10-31 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper explores the use of latent bootstrapping, an alternative self-supervision technique, for pretraining language models. Unlike the typical practice of using self-supervision on discrete subwords, latent bootstrapping leverages contextualized embeddings for a richer supervision signal. We conduct experiments to assess how effective this approach is for acquiring linguistic knowledge from limited resources. Specifically, our experiments are based on the BabyLM shared task, which includes pretraining on two small curated corpora and an evaluation on four linguistic benchmarks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.19420,
  title  = {Mean BERTs make erratic language teachers: the effectiveness of latent bootstrapping in low-resource settings},
  author = {David Samuel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.19420},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

submission to the BabyLM shared at CoNLL (EMNLP)