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MIRRORWIC: On Eliciting Word-in-Context Representations from Pretrained Language Models

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Liu, Q 
Korhonen, A 
Vulić, I 

Abstract

Recent work indicated that pretrained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa can be transformed into effective sentence and word encoders even via simple self-supervised techniques. Inspired by this line of work, in this paper we propose a fully unsupervised approach to improving word-in-context (WiC) representations in PLMs, achieved via a simple and efficient WiC-targeted fine-tuning procedure: MirrorWiC. The proposed method leverages only raw texts sampled from Wikipedia, assuming no sense-annotated data, and learns context-aware word representations within a standard contrastive learning setup. We experiment with a series of standard and comprehensive WiC benchmarks across multiple languages. Our proposed fully unsupervised MirrorWiC models obtain substantial gains over off-the-shelf PLMs across all monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual setups. Moreover, on some standard WiC benchmarks, MirrorWiC is even on-par with supervised models fine-tuned with in-task data and sense labels.

Description

Keywords

cs.CL, cs.CL

Journal Title

CoNLL 2021 - 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings

Conference Name

25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2021)

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics