Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entities

Yasumasa Onoe, Michael Zhang, Eunsol Choi, Greg Durrett


Abstract
Language models (LMs) are typically trained once on a large-scale corpus and used for years without being updated. However, in a dynamic world, new entities constantly arise. We propose a framework to analyze what LMs can infer about new entities that did not exist when the LMs were pretrained. We derive a dataset of entities indexed by their origination date and paired with their English Wikipedia articles, from which we can find sentences about each entity. We evaluate LMs’ perplexity on masked spans within these sentences. We show that models more informed about the entities, such as those with access to a textual definition of them, achieve lower perplexity on this benchmark. Our experimental results demonstrate that making inferences about new entities remains difficult for LMs. Given its wide coverage on entity knowledge and temporal indexing, our dataset can be used to evaluate LMs and techniques designed to modify or extend their knowledge. Our automatic data collection pipeline can be easily used to continually update our benchmark.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.52
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
693–702
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.52
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.52
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yasumasa Onoe, Michael Zhang, Eunsol Choi, and Greg Durrett. 2022. Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entities. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 693–702, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entities (Onoe et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.52.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.52.mp4
Data
LAMA