Domain Word Extension Using Curriculum Learning

Abstract

Self-supervised learning models, such as BERT, have improved the performance of various tasks in natural language processing. Although the effect is reduced in the out-of-domain field and not the the trained domain thus representing a limitation, it is difficult to train a new language model for a specific domain since it is both time-consuming and requires large amounts of data. We propose a method to quickly and effectively apply the pre-trained language models trained in the general domain to a specific domain’s vocabulary without re-training. An extended vocabulary list is obtained by extracting a meaningful wordpiece from the training data of the downstream task. We introduce curriculum learning, training the models with two successive updates, to adapt the embedding value of the new vocabulary. It is convenient to apply because all training of the models for downstream tasks are performed in one run. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments on AIDA-SC, AIDA-FC, and KLUE-TC, which are Korean classification tasks, and subsequently achieved stable performance improvement.