Using Wikidata for Enhancing Compositionality in Pre-trained Language Models

• One of the many advantages of pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa is their flexibility and contextual nature. These features give PLMs strong capabilities for representing lexical semantics. However, PLMs seem incapable of capturing high-level semantics in terms of compositionally. We show that when augmented with the relevant semantic knowledge, PMLs learn to capture a higher degree of lexical compositionality. We annotate a large dataset from Wikidata highlighting a type of semantic inference that is easy for humans to understand but difficult for PLMs, like the correlation between age and date of birth. We use this resource for finetuning DistilBERT, BERT large and RoBERTa. Our results show that the performance of PLMs against the test data continuously improves when augmented with such a rich resource. Our results are corroborated by a consistent improvement over most GLUE benchmark natural language understanding tasks.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

BERT

Pretrained Language Models

Computational Linguistics

Semantics in LLM

Datorlingvistik

Computational Linguistics

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)