Syntax-Enhanced Pre-trained Model

Zenan Xu, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Qinliang Su, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Wanjun Zhong, Xiaojun Quan, Daxin Jiang, Nan Duan


Abstract
We study the problem of leveraging the syntactic structure of text to enhance pre-trained models such as BERT and RoBERTa. Existing methods utilize syntax of text either in the pre-training stage or in the fine-tuning stage, so that they suffer from discrepancy between the two stages. Such a problem would lead to the necessity of having human-annotated syntactic information, which limits the application of existing methods to broader scenarios. To address this, we present a model that utilizes the syntax of text in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Our model is based on Transformer with a syntax-aware attention layer that considers the dependency tree of the text. We further introduce a new pre-training task of predicting the syntactic distance among tokens in the dependency tree. We evaluate the model on three downstream tasks, including relation classification, entity typing, and question answering. Results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on six public benchmark datasets. We have two major findings. First, we demonstrate that infusing automatically produced syntax of text improves pre-trained models. Second, global syntactic distances among tokens bring larger performance gains compared to local head relations between contiguous tokens.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.420
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:
5412–5422
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.420
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.420
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zenan Xu, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Qinliang Su, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Wanjun Zhong, Xiaojun Quan, Daxin Jiang, and Nan Duan. 2021. Syntax-Enhanced Pre-trained Model. 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 5412–5422, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Syntax-Enhanced Pre-trained Model (Xu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.420.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.420.mp4
Code
 Hi-ZenanXu/Syntax-Enhanced_Pre-trained_Model
Data
CosmosQAOpen EntityQUASARQUASAR-TSearchQA