VarMAE: Pre-training of Variational Masked Autoencoder for Domain-adaptive Language Understanding

Pre-trained language models have achieved promising performance on general benchmarks, but underperform when migrated to a specific domain. Recent works perform pre-training from scratch or continual pre-training on domain corpora. However, in many specific domains, the limited corpus can hardly support obtaining precise representations. To address this issue, we propose a novel Transformer-based language model named VarMAE for domain-adaptive language understanding. Under the masked autoencoding objective, we design a context uncertainty learning module to encode the token's context into a smooth latent distribution. The module can produce diverse and well-formed contextual representations. Experiments on science- and finance-domain NLU tasks demonstrate that VarMAE can be efficiently adapted to new domains with limited resources.

PALI-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Discriminative Fine-tuning of Deep Transformers for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) has a large harmful impact and is difficult to detect, both for human judges and existing NLP systems. At SemEval-2022 Task 4, we propose a novel Transformer-based model and its ensembles to accurately understand such language context for PCL detection. To facilitate comprehension of the subtle and subjective nature of PCL, two fine-tuning strategies are applied to capture discriminative features from diverse linguistic behaviour and categorical distribution. The system achieves remarkable results on the official ranking, namely 1st in Subtask 1 and 5th in Subtask 2. Extensive experiments on the task demonstrate the effectiveness of our system and its strategies.