Seongjin Shin
2022
On the Effect of Pretraining Corpora on In-context Learning by a Large-scale Language Model
Seongjin Shin
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Sang-Woo Lee
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Hwijeen Ahn
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Sungdong Kim
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HyoungSeok Kim
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Boseop Kim
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Kyunghyun Cho
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Gichang Lee
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Woomyoung Park
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Jung-Woo Ha
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Nako Sung
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Many recent studies on large-scale language models have reported successful in-context zero- and few-shot learning ability. However, the in-depth analysis of when in-context learning occurs is still lacking. For example, it is unknown how in-context learning performance changes as the training corpus varies. Here, we investigate the effects of the source and size of the pretraining corpus on in-context learning in HyperCLOVA, a Korean-centric GPT-3 model. From our in-depth investigation, we introduce the following observations: (1) in-context learning performance heavily depends on the corpus domain source, and the size of the pretraining corpus does not necessarily determine the emergence of in-context learning, (2) in-context learning ability can emerge when a language model is trained on a combination of multiple corpora, even when each corpus does not result in in-context learning on its own, (3) pretraining with a corpus related to a downstream task does not always guarantee the competitive in-context learning performance of the downstream task, especially in the few-shot setting, and (4) the relationship between language modeling (measured in perplexity) and in-context learning does not always correlate: e.g., low perplexity does not always imply high in-context few-shot learning performance.
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Co-authors
- Sang-Woo Lee 1
- Hwijeen Ahn 1
- Sungdong Kim 1
- HyoungSeok Kim 1
- Boseop Kim 1
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