APOLLO: A Simple Approach for Adaptive Pretraining of Language Models for Logical Reasoning

Soumya Sanyal, Yichong Xu, Shuohang Wang, Ziyi Yang, Reid Pryzant, Wenhao Yu, Chenguang Zhu, Xiang Ren


Abstract
Logical reasoning over text is an important ability that requires understanding the semantics of the text and reasoning through them to arrive at correct inferences. Prior works on pretraining language models to improve the logical reasoning ability require complex processing of training data (e.g., aligning symbolic knowledge to text), yielding task-specific data augmentation that is not easy to adapt to any general text corpus. In this work, we propose APOLLO, a simple adaptive pretraining approach to improve the logical reasoning skills of language models. We select a subset of Wikipedia for adaptive pretraining using a set of logical inference keywords as filter words. Further, we propose two self-supervised loss functions for training. First, we modify the masked language modeling loss only to mask specific parts-of-speech words that likely require higher-order reasoning to predict them. Second, we propose a sentence-level classification loss that teaches the model to distinguish between entailment and contradiction types of sentences. The proposed pretraining paradigm is both simple and independent of task formats. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APOLLO by comparing it with prior baselines on two logical reasoning datasets. APOLLO performs comparably on ReClor and outperforms baselines on LogiQA.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.347
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:
6308–6321
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.347
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.347
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Soumya Sanyal, Yichong Xu, Shuohang Wang, Ziyi Yang, Reid Pryzant, Wenhao Yu, Chenguang Zhu, and Xiang Ren. 2023. APOLLO: A Simple Approach for Adaptive Pretraining of Language Models for Logical Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6308–6321, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
APOLLO: A Simple Approach for Adaptive Pretraining of Language Models for Logical Reasoning (Sanyal et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.347.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.347.mp4