A Pre-trained Language Model is a model that has been trained on a large dataset to learn contextualized representations of language. These models are pretrained on tasks such as masked language modeling or predicting the next word in a sentence using vast amounts of text data. The pretrained model can then be fine-tuned on specific downstream tasks, such as text classification, named entity recognition, or sentiment analysis. Pretrained language models have become a cornerstone in NLP, as they capture rich semantic information from diverse language patterns, allowing them to be adapted to various applications with relatively little task-specific training data.

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Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning with Unrestricted Answer Scope

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Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning is defined as solving a commonsense question without providing 1) a short list of answer candidates and 2) a pre-defined answer scope. Conventional ways of formulating the commonsense question into a question-answering form or utilizing external knowledge to learn retrieval-based methods are less applicable in the open-ended setting due to an inherent challenge. Without pre-defining an answer scope or a few candidates, open-ended commonsense reasoning entails predicting answers by searching over an extremely large searching space. Moreover, most questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning, which presents even more challenges to our problem. In this work, we leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base, which does not require task-specific supervision. The reasoning paths can help to identify the most precise answer to the commonsense question. We conduct experiments on two commonsense benchmark datasets. Compared to other approaches, our proposed method achieves better performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.

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Multi-Faceted Knowledge-Driven Pre-training for Product Representation Learning

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As a key component of e-commerce computing, product representation learning (PRL) provides benefits for a variety of applications, including product matching, search, and categorization. The existing PRL approaches have poor language understanding ability due to their inability to capture contextualized semantics. In addition, the learned representations by existing methods are not easily transferable to new products. Inspired by the recent advance of pre-trained language models (PLMs), we make the attempt to adapt PLMs for PRL to mitigate the above issues. In this article, we develop KINDLE, a Knowledge-drIven pre-trainiNg framework for proDuct representation LEarning, which can preserve the contextual semantics and multi-faceted product knowledge robustly and flexibly. Specifically, we first extend traditional one-stage pre-training to a two-stage pre-training framework and exploit a deliberate knowledge encoder to ensure a smooth knowledge fusion into PLM. In addition, we propose a multi-objective heterogeneous embedding method to represent thousands of knowledge elements. This helps KINDLE calibrate knowledge noise and sparsity automatically by replacing isolated classes as training targets in knowledge acquisition tasks. Furthermore, an input-aware gating network is proposed to select the most relevant knowledge for different downstream tasks. Finally, extensive experiments have demonstrated the advantages of KINDLE over the state-of-the-art baselines across three downstream tasks.

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