How Can We Accelerate Progress Towards Human-like Linguistic Generalization?

Tal Linzen


Abstract
This position paper describes and critiques the Pretraining-Agnostic Identically Distributed (PAID) evaluation paradigm, which has become a central tool for measuring progress in natural language understanding. This paradigm consists of three stages: (1) pre-training of a word prediction model on a corpus of arbitrary size; (2) fine-tuning (transfer learning) on a training set representing a classification task; (3) evaluation on a test set drawn from the same distribution as that training set. This paradigm favors simple, low-bias architectures, which, first, can be scaled to process vast amounts of data, and second, can capture the fine-grained statistical properties of a particular data set, regardless of whether those properties are likely to generalize to examples of the task outside the data set. This contrasts with humans, who learn language from several orders of magnitude less data than the systems favored by this evaluation paradigm, and generalize to new tasks in a consistent way. We advocate for supplementing or replacing PAID with paradigms that reward architectures that generalize as quickly and robustly as humans.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.465
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5210–5217
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.465
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.465
Award:
 Honorable Mention for Best Theme Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tal Linzen. 2020. How Can We Accelerate Progress Towards Human-like Linguistic Generalization?. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5210–5217, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Can We Accelerate Progress Towards Human-like Linguistic Generalization? (Linzen, ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.465.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929098
Data
GLUESuperGLUE