Investigating Data Contamination for Pre-training Language Models

Language models pre-trained on web-scale corpora demonstrate impressive capabilities on diverse downstream tasks. However, there is increasing concern whether such capabilities might arise from evaluation datasets being included in the pre-training corpus -- a phenomenon known as \textit{data contamination} -- in a manner that artificially increases performance. There has been little understanding of how this potential contamination might influence LMs' performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we explore the impact of data contamination at the pre-training stage by pre-training a series of GPT-2 models \textit{from scratch}. We highlight the effect of both text contamination (\textit{i.e.}\ input text of the evaluation samples) and ground-truth contamination (\textit{i.e.}\ the prompts asked on the input and the desired outputs) from evaluation data. We also investigate the effects of repeating contamination for various downstream tasks. Additionally, we examine the prevailing n-gram-based definitions of contamination within current LLM reports, pinpointing their limitations and inadequacy. Our findings offer new insights into data contamination's effects on language model capabilities and underscore the need for independent, comprehensive contamination assessments in LLM studies.

ReactIE: Enhancing Chemical Reaction Extraction with Weak Supervision

Structured chemical reaction information plays a vital role for chemists engaged in laboratory work and advanced endeavors such as computer-aided drug design. Despite the importance of extracting structured reactions from scientific literature, data annotation for this purpose is cost-prohibitive due to the significant labor required from domain experts. Consequently, the scarcity of sufficient training data poses an obstacle to the progress of related models in this domain. In this paper, we propose ReactIE, which combines two weakly supervised approaches for pre-training. Our method utilizes frequent patterns within the text as linguistic cues to identify specific characteristics of chemical reactions. Additionally, we adopt synthetic data from patent records as distant supervision to incorporate domain knowledge into the model. Experiments demonstrate that ReactIE achieves substantial improvements and outperforms all existing baselines.

PromptClass: Weakly-Supervised Text Classification with Prompting Enhanced Noise-Robust Self-Training

Recently proposed weakly-supervised text classification settings train a classifier using the label name of each target class as the only supervision. Such weakly-supervised settings have been gaining increasing attention since they can largely reduce human annotation efforts compared to fully-supervised and semi-supervised settings. Most existing methods follow the strategy that first uses the label names as static features to generate pseudo labels, which are then used for classifier training. While reasonable, such a commonly adopted framework suffers from two limitations: (1) words can have different meanings in different contexts, so using label names for context-free matching can induce very noisy pseudo labels; and (2) the errors made in the pseudo label generation stage will directly propagate to the classifier training stage without a chance of being corrected. In this paper, we propose a new method, PromptClass, consisting of two modules: (1) a pseudo label acquisition module that uses zero-shot prompting of pre-trained language models (PLM) to get pseudo labels based on contextualized text understanding, and (2) a noise-robust self-training module that iteratively trains the classifier and updates pseudo labels by utilizing two PLM fine-tuning strategies that regularize each other. Extensive experiments show that PromptClass achieves overall better performance than existing strong baselines on four benchmark datasets and even achieves similar performance to fully-supervised classifiers on sentiment classification tasks.

OntoType: Ontology-Guided Zero-Shot Fine-Grained Entity Typing with Weak Supervision from Pre-Trained Language Models

Fine-grained entity typing (FET), which assigns entities in text with context-sensitive, fine-grained semantic types, will play an important role in natural language understanding. A supervised FET method, which typically relies on human-annotated corpora for training, is costly and difficult to scale. Recent studies leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generate rich and context-aware weak supervision for FET. However, a PLM may still generate a mixture of rough and fine-grained types, or tokens unsuitable for typing. In this study, we vision that an ontology provides a semantics-rich, hierarchical structure, which will help select the best results generated by multiple PLM models and head words. Specifically, we propose a novel zero-shot, ontology-guided FET method, OntoType, which follows a type ontological structure, from coarse to fine, ensembles multiple PLM prompting results to generate a set of type candidates, and refines its type resolution, under the local context with a natural language inference model. Our experiments on the Ontonotes, FIGER, and NYT datasets using their associated ontological structures demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot fine-grained entity typing methods. Our error analysis shows that refinement of the existing ontology structures will further improve fine-grained entity typing.

TaxoEnrich: Self-Supervised Taxonomy Completion via Structure-Semantic Representations

Taxonomies are fundamental to many real-world applications in various domains, serving as structural representations of knowledge. To deal with the increasing volume of new concepts needed to be organized as taxonomies, researchers turn to automatically completion of an existing taxonomy with new concepts. In this paper, we propose TaxoEnrich, a new taxonomy completion framework, which effectively leverages both semantic features and structural information in the existing taxonomy and offers a better representation of candidate position to boost the performance of taxonomy completion. Specifically, TaxoEnrich consists of four components: (1) taxonomy-contextualized embedding which incorporates both semantic meanings of concept and taxonomic relations based on powerful pretrained language models; (2) a taxonomy-aware sequential encoder which learns candidate position representations by encoding the structural information of taxonomy; (3) a query-aware sibling encoder which adaptively aggregates candidate siblings to augment candidate position representations based on their importance to the query-position matching; (4) a query-position matching model which extends existing work with our new candidate position representations. Extensive experiments on four large real-world datasets from different domains show that \TaxoEnrich achieves the best performance among all evaluation metrics and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.