Cited by 2,103Topic ModelingDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningNatural Language Processing Techniques

Don’t Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks

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Gururangan, Suchin, Marasović, Ana, Swayamdipta, Swabha, Lo, Kyle, Beltagy, Iz, Downey, Doug, Smith, Noah A.·2020·Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Language models pretrained on text from a wide variety of sources form the foundation of today's NLP. In light of the success of these broad-coverage models, we investigate whether it is still helpful to tailor a pretrained model to the domain of a target task. We present a study across four domains (biomedical and computer science publications, news, and reviews) and eight classification tasks, showing that a second phase of pretraining in-domain (domain-adaptive pretraining) leads to performance gains, under both high- and low-resource settings. Moreover, adapting to the task's unlabeled data (task-adaptive pretraining) improves performance even after domain-adaptive pretraining. Finally, we show that adapting to a task corpus augmented using simple data selection strategies is an effective alternative, especially when resources for domain-adaptive pretraining might be unavailable. Overall, we consistently find that multi-phase adaptive pretraining offers large gains in task performance.

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Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.740

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  • Domain adaptation studies show that task performance varies across domains, with general-purpose LLMs exhibiting stronger capabilities in well-represented areas such as Computer Vision than in specialized fields such as Quantum Computing, due to differences in pretraining corpus composition.

    “Domain adaptation studies [23] show that task performance varies across domains, with general-purpose LLMs exhibiting stronger capabilities in well-represented areas such as Computer Vision than in specialized fields such as Quantum Computing, due to differences in pretraining corpus composition.”

    From Abstention vs. Hallucination: Benchmarking LLM Source Attribution for Scientific Citations (2024) · cites this paper as [23]

    Split into 2 atoms — 0 confirmed, 2 partially supported, 0 disputed, 0 misattributed, 0 unverifiable. Expand the claim to see per-atom verdicts.

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  • Continued pre-training on domain-specific data has been shown to be effective for improving performance in a specific domain.

    “Continued pre-training on domainspecific data has been shown to be effective for improving performance in a specific domain (Gururangan et al., 2020).”

    From The Llama 3 Herd of Models (2024) · cites this paper as Gururangan et al., 2020

  • Further pre-training has been shown to increase scores when adapting a model to a specific domain or task.

    “Further pre-training has been shown to increase scores when adapting a model to a specific domain or task (Gururangan et al., 2020;Lee et al., 2020).”

    From QueryNER: Segmentation of E-commerce Queries (2024) · cites this paper as Gururangan et al., 2020

  • TAPT and DAPT were proposed by Gururangan et al.; TAPT continues training on target task training data after pre-training RoBERTa, while DAPT pre-trains RoBERTa on datasets with minor domain differences from target tasks.

    “Task adaptive pre-training (TAPT) and domain adaptive pre-training (DAPT) have been proposed by Gururangan et al. [37]. TAPT continues to train it on the target task's training dataset, after pre-training RoBERTa on large-scale corpora. DAPT is still pre-training RoBERTa on datasets with minor domain differences from datasets in target tasks.”

    From Self-supervised learning: A succinct review (2023) · cites this paper as [37]

  • The method relies on a comparison of gridbox-scale trends in observational datasets for temperature and precipitation with those produced in climate model runs from CMIP6.

    “The method relies on a comparison of gridbox-scale trends in observational datasets for temperature (HadCRUT4 version 4.6 54 ) and precipitation (GPCC v2018, obtainable from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcc.html),with those produced in climate model runs from CMIP6 55 .”

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5 of the 62 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Franck Dernoncourt and Ji Young Lee. 2017. Pubmed 200k RCT: a dataset for sequential sentence classification in medical abstracts. In IJCNLP . https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/I17-2052/
  2. Ruining He and Julian McAuley. 2016. Ups and downs: Modeling the visual evolution of fashion trends with one-class collaborative filtering. In WWW . https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01585 · arXiv
  3. Urvashi Khandelwal, Omer Levy, Dan Jurafsky, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Mike Lewis. 2020. Generalization through memorization: Nearest neighbor language models. In ICLR . To appear.
  4. Martin Krallinger, Obdulia Rabal, Saber Ahmad Akhondi, Mart´ ın P´ erez P´ erez, J´ es ´ us L´ opez Santamar´ ıa, Gael P´ erez Rodr´ ıguez, Georgios Tsatsaronis, Ander Intxaurrondo, Jos´ e Antonio Baso L´ opez, Umesh Nandal, E. M. van Buel, A. Poorna Chandrasekhar, Marleen Rodenburg, Astrid Lægreid, Marius A. Doornenbal, Julen Oyarz´ abal, An´ alia Lourenc ¸o, and Alfonso Valencia. 2017. Overview of the biocreative vi chemical-protein interaction track. In Proceedings of the BioCreative VI Workshop .
  5. Barbara Plank. 2016. What to do about non-standard (or non-canonical) language in NLP. In KONVENS . https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07836 · arXiv
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  8. Rowan Zellers, Ari Holtzman, Hannah Rashkin, Yonatan Bisk, Ali Farhadi, Franziska Roesner, and Yejin Choi. 2019. Defending against neural fake news. In NeurIPS .

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Gururangan, S., Marasović, A., Swayamdipta, S., Lo, K., Beltagy, I., Downey, D., & Smith, N. A.
Affiliations
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2020
Pages
8342-8360
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3017961061
Cited by
2,103
References
62
Citations by year
2026: 246 · 2025: 313 · 2024: 253 · 2023: 443 · 2022: 331 · 2021: 403 · 2020: 111 · 2019: 3
FWCI
122.98
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
domain-adaptive pretraining, language model fine-tuning, text classification, resource-limited settings, data selection, biomedical text, computer science literature

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