Analyzing the Forgetting Problem in Pretrain-Finetuning of Open-domain Dialogue Response Models

Tianxing He, Jun Liu, Kyunghyun Cho, Myle Ott, Bing Liu, James Glass, Fuchun Peng


Abstract
In this work, we study how the finetuning stage in the pretrain-finetune framework changes the behavior of a pretrained neural language generator. We focus on the transformer encoder-decoder model for the open-domain dialogue response generation task. Our major finding is that after standard finetuning, the model forgets some of the important language generation skills acquired during large-scale pretraining. We demonstrate the forgetting phenomenon through a set of detailed behavior analysis from the perspectives of knowledge transfer, context sensitivity, and function space projection. As a preliminary attempt to alleviate the forgetting problem, we propose an intuitive finetuning strategy named “mix-review”. We find that mix-review effectively regularizes the finetuning process, and the forgetting problem is alleviated to some extent. Finally, we discuss interesting behavior of the resulting dialogue model and its implications.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.95
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1121–1133
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.95
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.95
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianxing He, Jun Liu, Kyunghyun Cho, Myle Ott, Bing Liu, James Glass, and Fuchun Peng. 2021. Analyzing the Forgetting Problem in Pretrain-Finetuning of Open-domain Dialogue Response Models. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 1121–1133, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing the Forgetting Problem in Pretrain-Finetuning of Open-domain Dialogue Response Models (He et al., EACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.95.pdf
Dataset:
 2021.eacl-main.95.Dataset.pdf
Data
DailyDialog