Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fully Zero-Shot Learners

Xuandong Zhao, Siqi Ouyang, Zhiguo Yu, Ming Wu, Lei Li


Abstract
How can we extend a pre-trained model to many language understanding tasks, without labeled or additional unlabeled data? Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been effective for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, existing approaches either require fine-tuning on downstream labeled datasets or manually constructing proper prompts. In this paper, we propose nonparametric prompting PLM (NPPrompt) for fully zero-shot language understanding. Unlike previous methods, NPPrompt uses only pre-trained language models and does not require any labeled data or additional raw corpus for further fine-tuning, nor does it rely on humans to construct a comprehensive set of prompt label words. We evaluate NPPrompt against previous major few-shot and zero-shot learning methods on diverse NLP tasks: including text classification, text entailment, similar text retrieval, paraphrasing, and multiple-choice question answering. Experimental results demonstrate that our NPPrompt outperforms the previous best fully zero-shot method by big margins, with absolute gains of 12.8% in accuracy on text classification and 15.6% on the GLUE benchmark. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NPPrompt.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.869
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:
15590–15606
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.869
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.869
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuandong Zhao, Siqi Ouyang, Zhiguo Yu, Ming Wu, and Lei Li. 2023. Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fully Zero-Shot Learners. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15590–15606, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fully Zero-Shot Learners (Zhao et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.869.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.869.mp4