Arianna Patrizi


2023

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The Dark Side of the Language: Pre-trained Transformers in the DarkNet
Leonardo Ranaldi | Aria Nourbakhsh | Elena Sofia Ruzzetti | Arianna Patrizi | Dario Onorati | Michele Mastromattei | Francesca Fallucchi | Fabio Massimo Zanzotto
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

Pre-trained Transformers are challenging human performances in many Natural Language Processing tasks. The massive datasets used for pre-training seem to be the key to their success on existing tasks. In this paper, we explore how a range of pre-trained natural language understanding models performs on definitely unseen sentences provided by classification tasks over a DarkNet corpus. Surprisingly, results show that syntactic and lexical neural networks perform on par with pre-trained Transformers even after fine-tuning. Only after what we call extreme domain adaptation, that is, retraining with the masked language model task on all the novel corpus, pre-trained Transformers reach their standard high results. This suggests that huge pre-training corpora may give Transformers unexpected help since they are exposed to many of the possible sentences.