2021/04/16 by Michael Tänzer, Sebastian Ruder, Tänzer, Michael +3
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2105.00828
openalex publication_date 2021/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
State-of-the-art pre-trained language models have been shown to memorise facts and perform well with limited amounts of training data. To gain a better understanding of how these models learn, we study their generalisation and memorisation capabilities in noisy and low-resource scenarios. We find that the training of these models is almost unaffected by label noise and that it is possible to reach near-optimal results even on extremely noisy datasets. However, our experiments also show that they mainly learn from high-frequency patterns and largely fail when tested on low-resource tasks such as few-shot learning and rare entity recognition. To mitigate such limitations, we propose an extension based on prototypical networks that improves performance in low-resource named entity recognition tasks.