Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Weiwen Xu, Xin Li, Wenxuan Zhang, Meng Zhou, Wai Lam, Luo Si, Lidong Bing
We present Pre-trained Machine Reader (PMR), a novel method for retrofitting pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) to pre-trained machine reading comprehension (MRC) models without acquiring labeled data.PMR can resolve the discrepancy between model pre-training and downstream fine-tuning of existing MLMs.To build the proposed PMR, we constructed a large volume of general-purpose and high-quality MRC-style training data by using Wikipedia hyperlinks and designed a Wiki Anchor Extraction task to guide the MRC-style pre-training.Apart from its simplicity, PMR effectively solves extraction tasks, such as Extractive Question Answering and Named Entity Recognition. PMR shows tremendous improvements over existing approaches, especially in low-resource scenarios.When applied to the sequence classification task in the MRC formulation, PMR enables the extraction of high-quality rationales to explain the classification process, thereby providing greater prediction explainability. PMR also has the potential to serve as a unified model for tackling various extraction and classification tasks in the MRC formulation.