@inproceedings{iter-etal-2020-pretraining,
    title = "Pretraining with Contrastive Sentence Objectives Improves Discourse Performance of Language Models",
    author = "Iter, Dan  and
      Guu, Kelvin  and
      Lansing, Larry  and
      Jurafsky, Dan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.439",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.439",
    pages = "4859--4870",
    abstract = "Recent models for unsupervised representation learning of text have employed a number of techniques to improve contextual word representations but have put little focus on discourse-level representations. We propose Conpono, an inter-sentence objective for pretraining language models that models discourse coherence and the distance between sentences. Given an anchor sentence, our model is trained to predict the text k sentences away using a sampled-softmax objective where the candidates consist of neighboring sentences and sentences randomly sampled from the corpus. On the discourse representation benchmark DiscoEval, our model improves over the previous state-of-the-art by up to 13{\%} and on average 4{\%} absolute across 7 tasks. Our model is the same size as BERT-Base, but outperforms the much larger BERT-Large model and other more recent approaches that incorporate discourse. We also show that Conpono yields gains of 2{\%}-6{\%} absolute even for tasks that do not explicitly evaluate discourse: textual entailment (RTE), common sense reasoning (COPA) and reading comprehension (ReCoRD).",
}