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Domain adaptation for large neural language models (NLMs) is coupled with massive amounts of unstructured data in the pretraining phase. In this study, however, we show that pretrained NLMs learn in-domain information more effectively and…

We propose a novel task-agnostic in-domain pre-training method that sits between generic pre-training and fine-tuning. Our approach selectively masks in-domain keywords, i.e., words that provide a compact representation of the target…

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle on out-of-domain datasets like healthcare focused text. We explore specialized pre-training to adapt smaller LLMs to different healthcare datasets. Three methods are assessed:…

Open-retrieval question answering systems are generally trained and tested on large datasets in well-established domains. However, low-resource settings such as new and emerging domains would especially benefit from reliable question…

Adapting general large language models (LLMs) to specialized domains presents great challenges due to varied data distributions. This adaptation typically requires continual pre-training on massive domain-specific corpora to facilitate…

Recently, pre-trained programming language models such as CodeBERT have demonstrated substantial gains in code search. Despite showing great performance, they rely on the availability of large amounts of parallel data to fine-tune the…

Pre-trained deep language models~(LM) have advanced the state-of-the-art of text retrieval. Rerankers fine-tuned from deep LM estimates candidate relevance based on rich contextualized matching signals. Meanwhile, deep LMs can also be…

Middle training methods aim to bridge the gap between the Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training and the final finetuning for retrieval. Recent models such as CoCondenser, RetroMAE, and LexMAE argue that the MLM task is not sufficient…

This is the second year of the TREC Deep Learning Track, with the goal of studying ad hoc ranking in the large training data regime. We again have a document retrieval task and a passage retrieval task, each with hundreds of thousands of…

To enhance the domain-specific capabilities of large language models, continued pre-training on a domain-specific corpus is a prevalent method. Recent work demonstrates that adapting models using reading comprehension data formatted by…

Information overload is a prevalent challenge in many high-value domains. A prominent case in point is the explosion of the biomedical literature on COVID-19, which swelled to hundreds of thousands of papers in a matter of months. In…

Motivated by the success of pre-trained language models such as BERT in a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, recent research efforts have been made for adapting these models for different application domains. Along this…

Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using fine-tuned language models~(LM) for dense retrieval. However, dense retrievers are hard to train, typically requiring heavily engineered fine-tuning pipelines to realize their full…

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as dense retrievers, the impact of their domain-specific specialization on retrieval effectiveness remains underexplored. This investigation systematically examines how…

Transfer learning techniques are particularly useful in NLP tasks where a sizable amount of high-quality annotated data is difficult to obtain. Current approaches directly adapt a pre-trained language model (LM) on in-domain text before…

Recent advances in NLP are brought by a range of large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs). These PLMs have brought significant performance gains for a range of NLP tasks, circumventing the need to customize complex designs for specific…

Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks, performed on domain-specific data has shown significant promise. However, commercial use of such LLMs is limited by the high computational cost required for their deployment…

Adapting language models (LMs) to novel domains is often achieved through fine-tuning a pre-trained LM (PLM) on domain-specific data. Fine-tuning introduces new knowledge into an LM, enabling it to comprehend and efficiently perform a…

Language models pretrained on text from a wide variety of sources form the foundation of today's NLP. In light of the success of these broad-coverage models, we investigate whether it is still helpful to tailor a pretrained model to the…

Large Language Models (LLMs), being generic task solvers, are versatile. However, despite the vast amount of data they are trained on, there are speculations about their adaptation capabilities to a new domain. Additionally, the simple…