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Exploring Accurate and Generic Simile Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models

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Chinese Computational Linguistics (CCL 2023)

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Abstract

A simile is an important linguistic phenomenon in daily communication and an important task in natural language processing (NLP). In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in NLP since they learn generic knowledge from a large corpus. However, PLMs still have hallucination problems that they could generate unrealistic or context-unrelated information. In this paper, we aim to explore more accurate simile knowledge from PLMs. To this end, we first fine-tune a single model to perform three main simile tasks (recognition, interpretation, and generation). In this way, the model gains a better understanding of the simile knowledge. However, this understanding may be limited by the distribution of the training data. To explore more generic simile knowledge from PLMs, we further add semantic dependency features in three tasks. The semantic dependency feature serves as a global signal and helps the model learn simile knowledge that can be applied to unseen domains. We test with seen and unseen domains after training. Automatic evaluations demonstrate that our method helps the PLMs to explore more accurate and generic simile knowledge for downstream tasks. Our method of exploring more accurate knowledge is not only useful for simile study but also useful for other NLP tasks leveraging knowledge from PLMs. Our code and data will be released on GitHub.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/realZsh/simile-tasks.

  2. 2.

    https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP.

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Acknowledgements

This research project is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61872402), Science Foundation of Beijing Language and Culture University (supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”) (18ZDJ03).

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Correspondence to Yanqiu Shao .

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Zhou, S., Ma, L., Shao, Y. (2023). Exploring Accurate and Generic Simile Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models. In: Sun, M., et al. Chinese Computational Linguistics. CCL 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14232. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6207-5_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6207-5_22

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