Large language models (LLMs) can make predictions using *parametric knowledge* – knowledge encoded in the model weights – or *contextual knowledge* – knowledge presented in the context. In many scenarios, a desirable behavior is that LLMs give precedence to contextual knowledge when it conflicts with the parametric knowledge, and fall back to using their parametric knowledge when the context is irrelevant. This enables updating and correcting the model’s knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. Previous works have shown that LLMs are inclined to ignore contextual knowledge and fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. In this work, we discover that, with proper prompting methods, instruction-finetuned LLMs can be highly controllable by contextual knowledge and robust to irrelevant context. Utilizing this feature, we propose EREN (Edit models by REading Notes) to improve the scalability and robustness of LLM editing. To better evaluate the robustness of model editors, we collect a new dataset, that contains irrelevant questions that are more challenging than the ones in existing datasets. Empirical results show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Unlike existing techniques, it can integrate knowledge from multiple edits, and correctly respond to syntactically similar but semantically unrelated inputs (and vice versa). The source code can be found at https://github.com/thunlp/EREN.

We introduce the task of correcting named entity recognition (NER) errors without re-training model. After an NER model is trained and deployed in production,it makes prediction errors, which usually need to be fixed quickly. To address this problem, we firstly construct a gazetteer containing named entities and corresponding possible entity types. And then, we propose type enhanced BERT (TyBERT),a method that integrates the named entity’s type information into BERT by an adapter layer. When errors are identified, we can repair the model by updating the gazetteer. In other words, the gazetteer becomes a trigger to control NER model’s output. The experiment results in multiple corpus show the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms strong baselines.x