Learning Which Features Matter: RoBERTa Acquires a Preference for Linguistic Generalizations (Eventually)

Alex Warstadt, Yian Zhang, Xiaocheng Li, Haokun Liu, Samuel R. Bowman


Abstract
One reason pretraining on self-supervised linguistic tasks is effective is that it teaches models features that are helpful for language understanding. However, we want pretrained models to learn not only to represent linguistic features, but also to use those features preferentially during fine-turning. With this goal in mind, we introduce a new English-language diagnostic set called MSGS (the Mixed Signals Generalization Set), which consists of 20 ambiguous binary classification tasks that we use to test whether a pretrained model prefers linguistic or surface generalizations during finetuning. We pretrain RoBERTa from scratch on quantities of data ranging from 1M to 1B words and compare their performance on MSGS to the publicly available RoBERTa_BASE. We find that models can learn to represent linguistic features with little pretraining data, but require far more data to learn to prefer linguistic generalizations over surface ones. Eventually, with about 30B words of pretraining data, RoBERTa_BASE does consistently demonstrate a linguistic bias with some regularity. We conclude that while self-supervised pretraining is an effective way to learn helpful inductive biases, there is likely room to improve the rate at which models learn which features matter.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
217–235
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alex Warstadt, Yian Zhang, Xiaocheng Li, Haokun Liu, and Samuel R. Bowman. 2020. Learning Which Features Matter: RoBERTa Acquires a Preference for Linguistic Generalizations (Eventually). In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 217–235, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Which Features Matter: RoBERTa Acquires a Preference for Linguistic Generalizations (Eventually) (Warstadt et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.16.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939219
Code
 nyu-mll/msgs
Data
BookCorpus