ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models

  • Junyi Li
  • , Tianyi Tang
  • , Zheng Gong
  • , Lixin Yang
  • , Zhuohao Yu
  • , Zhipeng Chen
  • , Jingyuan Wang
  • , Wayne Xin Zhao*
  • , Ji Rong Wen
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Nowadays, pretrained language models (PLMs) have dominated the majority of NLP tasks. While, little research has been conducted on systematically evaluating the language abilities of PLMs. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study on genEral language ability evaluation of PLMs (ElitePLM). In our study, we design four evaluation dimensions, i.e., memory, comprehension, reasoning, and composition, to measure ten widely-used PLMs within five categories. Our empirical results demonstrate that: (1) PLMs with varying training objectives and strategies are good at different ability tests; (2) fine-tuning PLMs in downstream tasks is usually sensitive to the data size and distribution; (3) PLMs have excellent transferability between similar tasks. Moreover, the prediction results of PLMs in our experiments are released as an open resource for more deep and detailed analysis on the language abilities of PLMs. This paper can guide the future work to select, apply, and design PLMs for specific tasks. We have made all the details of experiments publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ElitePLM.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3519-3539
Number of pages21
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917711
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 - Hybrid, Seattle, United States
Duration: 10 Jul 202215 Jul 2022

Publication series

NameNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHybrid, Seattle
Period10/07/2215/07/22

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