We present COCO-LM, a new self-supervised learning framework that pretrains Language Models by COrrecting challenging errors and COntrasting text sequences. COCO-LM employs an auxiliary language model to mask-and-predict tokens in original text sequences. It creates more challenging pretraining inputs, where noises are sampled based on their likelihood in the auxiliary language model. COCO-LM then pretrains with two tasks: The first task, corrective language modeling, learns to correct the auxiliary model's corruptions by recovering the original tokens. The second task, sequence contrastive learning, ensures that the language model generates sequence representations that are invariant to noises and transformations. In our experiments on the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks, COCO-LM outperforms recent pretraining approaches in various pretraining settings and few-shot evaluations, with higher pretraining efficiency. Our analyses reveal that COCO-LM's advantages come from its challenging training signals, more contextualized token representations, and regularized sequence representations.
We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.
Learning low-dimensional embeddings of knowledge graphs is a powerful approach used to predict unobserved or missing edges between entities. However, an open challenge in this area is developing techniques that can go beyond simple edge prediction and handle more complex logical queries, which might involve multiple unobserved edges, entities, and variables. For instance, given an incomplete biological knowledge graph, we might want to predict "em what drugs are likely to target proteins involved with both diseases X and Y?" -- a query that requires reasoning about all possible proteins that {\em might} interact with diseases X and Y. Here we introduce a framework to efficiently make predictions about conjunctive logical queries -- a flexible but tractable subset of first-order logic -- on incomplete knowledge graphs. In our approach, we embed graph nodes in a low-dimensional space and represent logical operators as learned geometric operations (e.g., translation, rotation) in this embedding space. By performing logical operations within a low-dimensional embedding space, our approach achieves a time complexity that is linear in the number of query variables, compared to the exponential complexity required by a naive enumeration-based approach. We demonstrate the utility of this framework in two application studies on real-world datasets with millions of relations: predicting logical relationships in a network of drug-gene-disease interactions and in a graph-based representation of social interactions derived from a popular web forum.
Obtaining enough labeled data to robustly train complex discriminative models is a major bottleneck in the machine learning pipeline. A popular solution is combining multiple sources of weak supervision using generative models. The structure of these models affects training label quality, but is difficult to learn without any ground truth labels. We instead rely on these weak supervision sources having some structure by virtue of being encoded programmatically. We present Coral, a paradigm that infers generative model structure by statically analyzing the code for these heuristics, thus reducing the data required to learn structure significantly. We prove that Coral's sample complexity scales quasilinearly with the number of heuristics and number of relations found, improving over the standard sample complexity, which is exponential in $n$ for identifying $n^{\textrm{th}}$ degree relations. Experimentally, Coral matches or outperforms traditional structure learning approaches by up to 3.81 F1 points. Using Coral to model dependencies instead of assuming independence results in better performance than a fully supervised model by 3.07 accuracy points when heuristics are used to label radiology data without ground truth labels.