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Current NLP models are predominantly trained through a two-stage "pre-train then fine-tune" pipeline. Prior work has shown that inserting an intermediate pre-training stage, using heuristic masking policies for masked language modeling…
Closed-book question answering (QA) requires a model to directly answer an open-domain question without access to any external knowledge. Prior work on closed-book QA either directly finetunes or prompts a pretrained language model (LM) to…
Recent work has investigated the interesting question using pre-trained language models (PLMs) as knowledge bases for answering open questions. However, existing work is limited in using small benchmarks with high test-train overlaps. We…
Fine-tuning pre-trained language models for downstream tasks has become a norm for NLP. Recently it is found that intermediate training based on high-level inference tasks such as Question Answering (QA) can improve the performance of some…
Recently, pre-trained language models mostly follow the pre-train-then-fine-tuning paradigm and have achieved great performance on various downstream tasks. However, since the pre-training stage is typically task-agnostic and the…
Language models retain a significant amount of world knowledge from their pre-training stage. This allows knowledgeable models to be applied to knowledge-intensive tasks prevalent in information retrieval, such as ranking or question…
Open book question answering is a type of natural language based QA (NLQA) where questions are expected to be answered with respect to a given set of open book facts, and common knowledge about a topic. Recently a challenge involving such…
Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach…
Textbook Question Answering (TQA) is a complex multimodal task to infer answers given large context descriptions and abundant diagrams. Compared with Visual Question Answering (VQA), TQA contains a large number of uncommon terminologies and…
Question-answering (QA) that comes naturally to humans is a critical component in seamless human-computer interaction. It has emerged as one of the most convenient and natural methods to interact with the web and is especially desirable in…
Salient Span Masking (SSM) has shown itself to be an effective strategy to improve closed-book question answering performance. SSM extends general masked language model pretraining by creating additional unsupervised training sentences that…
Today the pre-trained language models achieve great success for question generation (QG) task and significantly outperform traditional sequence-to-sequence approaches. However, the pre-trained models treat the input passage as a flat…
Medical multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is particularly difficult. Questions may describe patient symptoms and ask for the correct diagnosis, which requires domain knowledge and complex reasoning. Standard language modeling…
Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important challenge, as it would lead to faster and more accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. Most existing methods approach it as a multi-class classification problem, which restricts…
The task of learning from only a few examples (called a few-shot setting) is of key importance and relevance to a real-world setting. For question answering (QA), the current state-of-the-art pre-trained models typically need fine-tuning on…
Retrieval augmented language models have recently become the standard for knowledge intensive tasks. Rather than relying purely on latent semantics within the parameters of large neural models, these methods enlist a semi-parametric memory…
Our goal is to deliver a new task and leaderboard to stimulate research on question answering and pre-trained language models (PTLMs) to understand a significant instructional document, e.g., an introductory college textbook or a manual.…
Human knowledge is collectively encoded in the roughly 6500 languages spoken around the world, but it is not distributed equally across languages. Hence, for information-seeking question answering (QA) systems to adequately serve speakers…
Biomedical question-answering (QA) has gained increased attention for its capability to provide users with high-quality information from a vast scientific literature. Although an increasing number of biomedical QA datasets has been recently…
The integration of multi-document pre-training objectives into language models has resulted in remarkable improvements in multi-document downstream tasks. In this work, we propose extending this idea by pre-training a generic multi-document…