What Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Zero-shot Learners?

Jinghui Lu, Dongsheng Zhu, Weidong Han, Rui Zhao, Brian Mac Namee, Fei Tan


Abstract
Current methods for prompt learning in zero-shot scenarios widely rely on a development set with sufficient human-annotated data to select the best-performing prompt template a posteriori. This is not ideal because in a real-world zero-shot scenario of practical relevance, no labelled data is available. Thus, we propose a simple yet effective method for screening reasonable prompt templates in zero-shot text classification: Perplexity Selection (Perplection). We hypothesize that language discrepancy can be used to measure the efficacy of prompt templates, and thereby develop a substantiated perplexity-based scheme allowing for forecasting the performance of prompt templates in advance. Experiments show that our method leads to improved prediction performance in a realistic zero-shot setting, eliminating the need for any labelled examples.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.128
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2288–2303
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.128
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.128
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinghui Lu, Dongsheng Zhu, Weidong Han, Rui Zhao, Brian Mac Namee, and Fei Tan. 2023. What Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Zero-shot Learners?. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2288–2303, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Zero-shot Learners? (Lu et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.128.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.128.mp4