Recently pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various language understanding tasks. Current pre-training procedures usually focus on training the model with several simple tasks to grasp the co-occurrence of words or sentences. However, besides co-occurring information, there exists other valuable lexical, syntactic and semantic information in training corpora, such as named entities, semantic closeness and discourse relations. In order to extract the lexical, syntactic and semantic information from training corpora, we propose a continual pre-training framework named ERNIE 2.0 which incrementally builds pre-training tasks and then learn pre-trained models on these constructed tasks via continual multi-task learning. Based on this framework, we construct several tasks and train the ERNIE 2.0 model to capture lexical, syntactic and semantic aspects of information in the training data. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE 2.0 model outperforms BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks including English tasks on GLUE benchmarks and several similar tasks in Chinese. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

We present a novel language representation model enhanced by knowledge called ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration). Inspired by the masking strategy of BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), ERNIE is designed to learn language representation enhanced by knowledge masking strategies, which includes entity-level masking and phrase-level masking. Entity-level strategy masks entities which are usually composed of multiple words. Phrase-level strategy masks the whole phrase which is composed of several words standing together as a conceptual unit. Experimental results show that ERNIE outperforms other baseline methods, achieving new state-of-the-art results on five Chinese natural language processing tasks including natural language inference, semantic similarity, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis and question answering. We also demonstrate that ERNIE has more powerful knowledge inference capacity on a cloze test.

Graph neural network (GNN) and label propagation algorithm (LPA) are both message passing algorithms, which have achieved superior performance in semi-supervised classification. GNN performs feature propagation by a neural network to make predictions, while LPA uses label propagation across graph adjacency matrix to get results. However, there is still no effective way to directly combine these two kinds of algorithms. To address this issue, we propose a novel Unified Message Passaging Model (UniMP) that can incorporate feature and label propagation at both training and inference time. First, UniMP adopts a Graph Transformer network, taking feature embedding and label embedding as input information for propagation. Second, to train the network without overfitting in self-loop input label information, UniMP introduces a masked label prediction strategy, in which some percentage of input label information are masked at random, and then predicted. UniMP conceptually unifies feature propagation and label propagation and is empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art semi-supervised classification results in Open Graph Benchmark (OGB).

Graph convolutional network (GCN) and label propagation algorithms (LPA) are both message passing algorithms, which have achieved superior performance in semi-supervised classification. GCN performs feature propagation by a neural network to make predictions, while LPA uses label propagation across graph adjacency matrix to get results. However, there is still no good way to combine these two kinds of algorithms. In this paper, we proposed a new Unified Massage Passaging model (UniMP) that can incorporate feature propagation and label propagation with a shared message passing network, providing a better performance in semi-supervised classification. First, we adopt a graph Transformer network jointly label embedding to propagate both the feature and label information. Second, to train UniMP without overfitting in self-loop label information, we propose a masked label prediction method, in which some percentage of training examples are simply masked at random, and then predicted. UniMP conceptually unifies feature propagation and label propagation and be empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art semi-supervised classification results in Open Graph Benchmark (OGB). Our implementation is available online https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PGL/tree/main/ ogb_examples/nodeproppred/unimp.

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