Does Pre-training Induce Systematic Inference? How Masked Language Models Acquire Commonsense Knowledge

Ian Porada; Alessandro Sordoni; Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

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arXiv · 2112.08583

Does Pre-training Induce Systematic Inference? How Masked Language Models Acquire Commonsense Knowledge

Ian Porada·Alessandro Sordoni·Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

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Abstract

Transformer models pre-trained with a masked-language-modeling objective (e.g., BERT) encode commonsense knowledge as evidenced by behavioral probes; however, the extent to which this knowledge is acquired by systematic inference over the semantics of the pre-training corpora is an open question. To answer this question, we selectively inject verbalized knowledge into the minibatches of a BERT model during pre-training and evaluate how well the model generalizes to supported inferences. We find generalization does not improve over the course of pre-training, suggesting that commonsense knowledge is acquired from surface-level, co-occurrence patterns rather than induced, systematic reasoning.

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Ian Porada, Alessandro Sordoni, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. 2021-12-16. Does Pre-training Induce Systematic Inference? How Masked Language Models Acquire Commonsense Knowledge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.08583

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