Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases

Boxi Cao, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Lingyong Yan, Meng Liao, Tong Xue, Jin Xu


Abstract
Previous literatures show that pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT can achieve competitive factual knowledge extraction performance on some datasets, indicating that MLMs can potentially be a reliable knowledge source. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs over different extraction paradigms. By investigating the behaviors of MLMs, we find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts. Furthermore, incorporating illustrative cases and external contexts improve knowledge prediction mainly due to entity type guidance and golden answer leakage. Our findings shed light on the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs, and strongly question the previous conclusion that current MLMs can potentially serve as reliable factual knowledge bases.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.146
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1860–1874
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.146
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.146
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Boxi Cao, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Lingyong Yan, Meng Liao, Tong Xue, and Jin Xu. 2021. Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1860–1874, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases (Cao et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.146.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.acl-long.146.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.146.mp4
Code
 c-box/LANKA
Data
CommonsenseQALAMA