Some NLP tasks can be solved in a fully unsupervised fashion by providing a pretrained language model with "task descriptions" in natural language (e.g., Radford et al., 2019). While this approach underperforms its supervised counterpart, we show in this work that the two ideas can be combined: We introduce Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET), a semi-supervised training procedure that reformulates input examples as cloze-style phrases to help language models understand a given task. These phrases are then used to assign soft labels to a large set of unlabeled examples. Finally, standard supervised training is performed on the resulting training set. For several tasks and languages, PET outperforms supervised training and strong semi-supervised approaches in lowresource settings by a large margin. 1
When scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) achieve remarkable few-shot performance on challenging natural language understanding benchmarks. In this work, we show that performance similar to GPT-3 can be obtained with language models whose parameter count is several orders of magnitude smaller. This is achieved by converting textual inputs into cloze questions that contain some form of task description, combined with gradient-based optimization; additionally exploiting unlabeled data gives further improvements. Based on our findings, we identify several key factors required for successful natural language understanding with small language models. 1
A recent approach for few-shot text classification is to convert textual inputs to cloze questions that contain some form of task description, process them with a pretrained language model and map the predicted words to labels. Manually defining this mapping between words and labels requires both domain expertise and an understanding of the language model's abilities. To mitigate this issue, we devise an approach that automatically finds such a mapping given small amounts of training data. For a number of tasks, the mapping found by our approach performs almost as well as hand-crafted label-to-word mappings. 1
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