Injecting Numerical Reasoning Skills into Language Models

Mor Geva, Ankit Gupta, Jonathan Berant


Abstract
Large pre-trained language models (LMs) are known to encode substantial amounts of linguistic information. However, high-level reasoning skills, such as numerical reasoning, are difficult to learn from a language-modeling objective only. Consequently, existing models for numerical reasoning have used specialized architectures with limited flexibility. In this work, we show that numerical reasoning is amenable to automatic data generation, and thus one can inject this skill into pre-trained LMs, by generating large amounts of data, and training in a multi-task setup. We show that pre-training our model, GenBERT, on this data, dramatically improves performance on DROP (49.3 –> 72.3 F1), reaching performance that matches state-of-the-art models of comparable size, while using a simple and general-purpose encoder-decoder architecture. Moreover, GenBERT generalizes well to math word problem datasets, while maintaining high performance on standard RC tasks. Our approach provides a general recipe for injecting skills into large pre-trained LMs, whenever the skill is amenable to automatic data augmentation.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.89
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
946–958
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.89
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.89
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mor Geva, Ankit Gupta, and Jonathan Berant. 2020. Injecting Numerical Reasoning Skills into Language Models. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 946–958, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Injecting Numerical Reasoning Skills into Language Models (Geva et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.89.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929021
Code
 ag1988/injecting_numeracy +  additional community code
Data
DROPMAWPSSQuAD