Cited by 233Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

Measuring and improving consistency in pretrained language models

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Elazar, Yanai, Kassner, Nora, Ravfogel, Shauli, Ravichander, Abhilasha, Hovy, Eduard, Schütze, Hinrich, Goldberg, Yoav·2021·Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Consistency of a model—that is, the invariance of its behavior under meaning-preserving alternations in its input—is a highly desirable property in natural language processing. In this paper we study the question: Are Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) consistent with respect to factual knowledge? To this end, we create ParaRel🤘, a high-quality resource of cloze-style query English paraphrases. It contains a total of 328 paraphrases for 38 relations. Using ParaRel🤘, we show that the consistency of all PLMs we experiment with is poor— though with high variance between relations. Our analysis of the representational spaces of PLMs suggests that they have a poor structure and are currently not suitable for representing knowledge robustly. Finally, we propose a method for improving model consistency and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness.1

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  • LLMs can struggle on commonsense knowledge benchmarks, especially once low-level statistical cues are controlled for.

    “As a result, LLMs can struggle on commonsense knowledge benchmarks [158], especially once low-level statistical cues are controlled for [9].”

    From Dissociating language and thought in large language models (2024) · cites this paper as [9]

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. John Hewitt and Christopher D. Manning. 2019. A structural probe for finding syntax in word representations. In North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguis- tics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL). Association for Computational Linguistics.
  2. Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. 2019. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog, 1(8):9.

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Authors
Elazar, Y., Kassner, N., Ravfogel, S., Ravichander, A., Hovy, E., Schütze, H., & Goldberg, Y.
Affiliations
  • Bar-Ilan University (IL)
  • Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
  • Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Corresponding author
  • Elazar, Yanai
  • Kassner, Nora
  • Ravfogel, Shauli
  • Ravichander, Abhilasha
  • Hovy, Eduard
  • Goldberg, Yoav
Venue
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2021
Volume
9
Pages
1012-1031
ISSN
2307-387X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3202712981
Cited by
220
References
93
Citations by year
2026: 37 · 2025: 40 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 74 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 17 · 2020: 2
FWCI
12.35
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1801316, 1914486, 1330596)
  • Brandeis University
  • European Commission (HORIZON2020)
  • Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (01IS18036A)
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (FA8750, FA8750-15-2-0277)
  • H2020 European Research Council (802774, 740516)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
pre-trained language models, consistency, factual knowledge, paraphrase, knowledge representation, representational space

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