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BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova · 11 Oct 2018 · arxiv.org

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In plain words

Train a language model to guess randomly hidden words using the full surrounding text so it sees both directions, then lightly adjust it for many different tasks. This lets one model handle question answering and other jobs with almost no custom design and raises scores a lot on eleven language tests, including 7.7 points to 80.5 on the main suite. It proposes a training method that builds on prior language models but pushes against their one-way limits.

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Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova did not write this page.

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  1. We argue that current techniques restrict the power of the pre-trained representations, especially for the fine-tuning approaches. The major limitation is that standard language models are unidirectional, and this limits the choice of architectures that can be used during pre-training.
  2. Such restrictions are sub-optimal for sentence-level tasks, and could be very harmful when applying fine-tuning based approaches to token-level tasks such as question answering, where it is crucial to incorporate context from both directions.
  3. We show that pre-trained representations reduce the need for many heavily-engineered task-specific architectures.
  4. Intuitively, it is reasonable to believe that a deep bidirectional model is strictly more powerful than either a left-to-right model or the shallow concatenation of a left-to-right and a right-to-left model.