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Our goal is to enable a robot to learn how to sequence its actions to perform tasks specified as natural language instructions, given successful demonstrations from a human partner. The ability to plan high-level tasks can be factored as…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) display impressive performances and have captured the attention of the NLP community. Establishing best practices in pretraining has, therefore, become a major focus of NLP research, especially since…

Time is an important aspect of documents and is used in a range of NLP and IR tasks. In this work, we investigate methods for incorporating temporal information during pre-training to further improve the performance on time-related tasks.…

Pre-training large-scale neural language models on raw texts has made a significant contribution to improving transfer learning in natural language processing (NLP). With the introduction of transformer-based language models, such as…

Pre-trained models are nowadays a fundamental component of machine learning research. In continual learning, they are commonly used to initialize the model before training on the stream of non-stationary data. However, pre-training is…

Large-scale pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning is now the standard methodology for many tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. Recently, a multitude of methods have been proposed for pretraining vision and language…

Current large language models can perform reasonably well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. Are these models applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training and reason outside of…

Entity Recognition (ER) within a text is a fundamental exercise in Natural Language Processing, enabling further depending tasks such as Knowledge Extraction, Text Summarisation, or Keyphrase Extraction. An entity consists of single words…

To facilitate research on text generation, this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, TextBox 2.0, focusing on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs). To be comprehensive, our library covers $13$ common text generation…

Particularly in low-data regimes, an outstanding challenge in machine learning is developing principled techniques for augmenting our models with suitable priors. This is to encourage them to learn in ways that are compatible with our…

The application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has achieved a high level of relevance in several areas. In the field of software engineering (SE), NLP applications are based on the classification of similar texts (e.g. software…

The pre-trained language models have achieved great successes in various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks due to its capacity to capture the deep contextualized information in text by pre-training on large-scale corpora. In this…

In recent years, BERT has made significant breakthroughs on many natural language processing tasks and attracted great attentions. Despite its accuracy gains, the BERT model generally involves a huge number of parameters and needs to be…

Increasing model size when pretraining natural language representations often results in improved performance on downstream tasks. However, at some point further model increases become harder due to GPU/TPU memory limitations and longer…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is now a common approach for text classification in a wide range of applications. When labeled documents are scarce, active learning helps save annotation efforts but requires retraining of massive…

State-of-the-art performance on language understanding tasks is now achieved with increasingly large networks; the current record holder has billions of parameters. Given a language model pre-trained on massive unlabeled text corpora, only…

A real-world text corpus sometimes comprises not only text documents but also semantic links between them (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic network are linked by citations and co-authorships). Text documents and semantic connections…

Pretraining language models directly on web-scale corpora is the de facto paradigm. We study an alternative where the model is initially exposed to abstract structured data to ease the subsequent acquisition of rich semantic knowledge, much…

Lately, instruction-based techniques have made significant strides in improving performance in few-shot learning scenarios. They achieve this by bridging the gap between pre-trained language models and fine-tuning for specific downstream…

Recent works show that learning contextualized embeddings for words is beneficial for downstream tasks. BERT is one successful example of this approach. It learns embeddings by solving two tasks, which are masked language model (masked LM)…