Semanlink - Not Encoding Factual Knowledge in Language Model AND Arxiv Doc

> To capture knowledge in a more modular and interpretable way, we augment language model pre-training with a latent knowledge retriever, which allows the model to retrieve and attend over documents from a large corpus such as Wikipedia, used during pre-training, fine-tuning and inference. **For the first time, we show how to pre-train such a knowledge retriever in an unsupervised manner**, using masked language modeling as the learning signal and backpropagating through a retrieval step that considers millions of documents

Hum, #TODO: parallel to be drawn with techniques in [KG-augmented Language Models](tag:knowledge_graph_augmented_language_models) which focus "on the problem of capturing declarative knowledge in the learned parameters of a language model."

[Google AI Blog Post](doc:2020/08/google_ai_blog_realm_integrat)

[Summary](https://joeddav.github.io/blog/2020/03/03/REALM.html) for the [Hugging Face awesome-papers reading group](doc:2021/03/huggingface_awesome_papers_pap)

2020-12-12 About

[2004.07202] Entities as Experts: Sparse Memory Access with Entity Supervision

Tags:

2020-07-11 About

[2007.00849] Facts as Experts: Adaptable and Interpretable Neural Memory over Symbolic Knowledge

Tags:

> a neural language model that includes **an explicit interface between symbolically interpretable factual information and subsymbolic neural knowledge.**... **The model can be updated without re-training by manipulating its symbolic representations**. In particular this model allows us to add new facts and overwrite existing ones.

> a **neural language model which learns to access information
in a symbolic knowledge graph.**

> This
model builds on the recently-proposed [Entities as
Experts](doc:2020/07/2004_07202_entities_as_expert) (EaE) language model (Févry et al., 2020),
which extends the same transformer (Vaswani
et al., 2017) architecture of BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) with an additional external memory for entities.
>
> After training EaE, the embedding associated
with an entity will (ideally) capture information
about the textual context in which that
entity appears, and by inference, the entity’s semantic
properties
>
> we include an additional
memory called a fact memory, which encodes
triples from a symbolic KB.
>
> This combination results in a
neural language model which learns to access information
in a the symbolic knowledge graph.

TODO:

- read again IBM's [Span Selection Pre-training for Question Answering](doc:2019/09/_1909_04120_span_selection_pre) ("an effort to avoid encoding general knowledge in the transformer network itself")
- compare with [[1907.05242] Large Memory Layers with Product Keys](doc:2019/07/_1907_05242_large_memory_layer)
- how does it relate with [[2002.08909] REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](doc:2020/12/2002_08909_realm_retrieval_a)?

2020-07-09 About

[1909.04120] Span Selection Pre-training for Question Answering

Tags:

> a **new pre-training task inspired by reading
comprehension** and an **effort to avoid encoding general knowledge in the transformer network itself**

Current transformer architectures store general knowledge -> large models, long pre-training time. Better to offload the requirement of general knowledge to a sparsely activated network.

"Span selection" as an additional auxiliary task: the query is a sentence drawn from a corpus
with a term replaced with a special token: [BLANK]. The term replaced by the blank is the answer term. The passage is
relevant as determined by a BM25 search, and answer-bearing (containing the answer
term). Unlike BERT’s cloze task, where the answer must be drawn from the model itself, the answer is found in a passage
using language understanding.

> **We hope to progress to a model of general purpose language modeling that uses an indexed long
term memory to retrieve world knowledge, rather than holding it in the densely activated transformer encoder layers.**

2019-09-18 About