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  "evidence": ["In our experiments, we compare the performance of our model against BERT and RoBERTa."]
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Paper: Symmetric Regularization based BERT for Pair-wise Semantic Reasoning

The ability of semantic reasoning over the sentence pair is essential for many natural language understanding tasks, e.g., natural language inference and machine reading comprehension. A recent significant improvement in these tasks comes from BERT. As reported, the next sentence prediction (NSP) in BERT, which learns the contextual relationship between two sentences, is of great significance for downstream problems with sentence-pair input. Despite the effectiveness of NSP, we suggest that NSP still lacks the essential signal to distinguish between entailment and shallow correlation. To remedy this, we propose to augment the NSP task to a 3-class categorization task, which includes a category for previous sentence prediction (PSP). The involvement of PSP encourages the model to focus on the informative semantics to determine the sentence order, thereby improves the ability of semantic understanding. This simple modification yields remarkable improvement against vanilla BERT. To further incorporate the document-level information, the scope of NSP and PSP is expanded into a broader range, i.e., NSP and PSP also include close but nonsuccessive sentences, the noise of which is mitigated by the label-smoothing technique. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our method consistently improves the performance on the NLI and MRC benchmarks, including the challenging HANS dataset~\cite{hans}, suggesting that the document-level task is still promising for the pre-training.

Related Work ::: Unsupervised learning from document
In recent years, many unsupervised pre-training methods have been proposed in the NLP fields to extract knowledge among sentences DBLP:conf/nips/KirosZSZUTF15,DBLP:conf/emnlp/ConneauKSBB17,DBLP:conf/iclr/LogeswaranL18,DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1903-09424. The prediction of surrounding sentences endows the model with the ability to model the sentence-level coherence. Skip-Thought BIBREF8 consists of an encoder and two decoders. When a sentence is given and encoded into a vector by the encoder, the decoders are trained to predict the next sentence and the previous sentence. The goal is to obtain a better sentence representation that is useful for reconstructing the surrounding context. Considering that the estimation of the likelihood of sequences is computationally expensive and time-consuming, the Quick-Thought method BIBREF9 simplifies this in a manner similar to sampled softmax BIBREF10, which classifies the input sentences between surrounding sentences and the other. Note that Quick-Thought does not distinguish between the previous and next sentence as it is functionally rotation invariant. However, BERT is order-dependent, and the discrimination can provide more supervision signal for semantic learning. InferSent BIBREF11 instead pre-trains the model in a manner of supervised learning. It uses a large-scale NLI dataset as the pre-training task to learn the sentence representation. In our work, we focus on designing a more effective document-level objective, extended from the NSP task. The proposed method will be described in the following section and validated by providing extensive experimental results in the experiment part.

Method
Our method follows the same input format and the model architecture with original BERT. The proposed method solely concerns the NSP task. The NSP task is a binary classification task, which takes two sentences (A and B) as input and determines whether B is the next sentence of A. Although it has been proven to be very effective for BERT, there are two major deficiencies. (1) Discrimination between IsNext and DiffDoc (the label of the sentences drawn from different documents via negative sampling) is semantically shallow as the signal of sentence order is absent. The correlation between two successive sentences could be obvious, due to, for example, lexical overlap or the conjunction used at the beginning of the second sentence. As reported BIBREF1, the final pre-trained model is able to achieve 97%-98% accuracy on the NSP task. (2) BERT is order-sensitive, i.e., $f_{\text{BERT}}( \texttt {A}, \texttt {B}) \ne f_{\text{BERT}}(\texttt {B}, \texttt {A})$, while NSP is uni-directional. When the order of the input NLI pair is reversed, the performance will degrade. For instance, the accuracy decreases by about 0.5% on MNLI BIBREF12 and 0.4% on QNLI after swapping the sentences in our experiments .
Motivated by these problems, we propose to extend the NSP task with previous sentence prediction (PSP). Despite its simplicity, empirical results show that this is beneficial for downstream tasks, including both NLI and MRC tasks. To further incorporate the document-level information, the scope is also expanded to include more surrounding sentences, not just the adjacent. The method is briefly illustrated in Fig. FIGREF6.

Method ::: Previous Sentence Prediction
Learning to recognize the previous sentence enables the model to capture more compact context information. One would argue that IsPrev (the label of PSP) is redundant as it plays a similar role of IsNext (the label of NSP). In fact, Quick-Thought uses the sampled softmax to approximate the sentence likelihood estimation of Skip-Thought, and it actually does not differentiate between the previous and next sentences. However, we suggest the order discrimination is essential for BERT pre-training. Quick-Thought aims at extracting sentence embedding, and it uses a rotating symmetric function, which makes IsPrev redundant in Quick-Thought. In contrast, BERT is order-sensitive, and learning the symmetric regularization is rather necessary. Another advantage of PSP is to enhance document-level supervision. In order to tell the difference between NSP and PSP, the model has to extract the detailed semantic for inference.

Method ::: Gathering More Document-level Information
Beyond NSP and PSP, which enable the model to learn the short-term dependency between sentences, we also propose to expand the scope of discrimination task to further incorporate the document-level information.
Specifically, we also include the in-adjacent sentences in the sentence-pair classification task. The in-adjacent sentences next to the IsPrev and IsNext sentences are sampled, labeled as IsPrevInadj and IsNextInadj (cf. the bottom of Fig. FIGREF6). Note that these in-adjacent sentences will introduce much more training noise to the model. Therefore, the label smoothing technique is adopted to reduce the noise of these additional samples. It achieves this by relaxing our confidence on the labels, e.g., transforming the target probability from (1.0, 0.0) to (0.8, 0.2) in a binary classification problem.
In summary, when A is given, the pre-training example for each label is constructed as follows:
IsNext: Choosing the adjacent following sentence as B.
IsPrev: Choosing the adjacent previous sentence as B.
IsNextInadj: Choosing the in-adjacent following sentence as B. There is a sentence between A and B.
IsPrevInadj: Choosing the in-adjacent previous sentence as B. There is a sentence between A and B.
DiffDoc: Drawing B randomly from a different document.

Experiment Settings
This section gives detailed experiment settings. The method is evaluated on the BERTbase model, which has 12 layers, 12 self-attention heads with a hidden size of 768.
To accelerate the training speed, two-phase training BIBREF1 is adopted. The first phase uses a maximal sentence length of 128, and 512 for the second phase. The numbers of training steps of two phases are 50K and 40K for the BERTBase model. We used AdamW BIBREF13 optimizer with a learning rate of 1e-4, a $\beta _1$ of 0.9, a $\beta _2$ of 0.999 and a L2 weight decay rate of $0.01$. The first 10% of the total steps are used for learning rate warming up, followed by the linear decay schema. We used a dropout probability of 0.1 on all layers. The data used for pre-training is the same as BERT, i.e., English Wikipedia (2500M words) and BookCorpus (800M words) BIBREF14. For the Masked LM task, we followed the same masking rate and settings as in BERT.
We explore three method settings for comparison.
BERT-PN: The NSP task in BERT is replaced by a 3-class task with IsNext, IsPrev and DiffDoc. The label distribution is 1:1:1.
BERT-PN5cls: The NSP task in BERT is replaced by a 5-class task with two additional labels IsNextInadj, IsPrevInadj. The label distribution is 1:1:1:1:1.
BERT-PNsmth: It uses the same data with BERT-PN5cls, except that the IsPrevInadj (IsNextInadj) label is mapped to IsPrev (IsNext) with a label smoothing factor of 0.8.
BERT-PN is used to verify the feasibility of PSP. The comparison with BERT-PN5cls illustrates whether more document-level information helps. BERT-PNsmth, which is the label-smoothed version of BERT-PN5cls, is used to compare with BERT-PN5cls to see whether the noise reduction is necessary.
In the following, we first show that BERT is order-sensitive and the use of PSP remedies this problem. Then we provide experimental results on the NLI and MRC tasks to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. At last, the proposed method is evaluated on several Chinese datasets.

Order-invariant with PSP
NSP in the pre-training is useful for NLI and MRC task BIBREF1. However, we suggested that BERT trained with NSP is order-sensitive, i.e., the performance of BERT depends on the order of the input sentence pair. To verify our assumption, a primary experiment was conducted. The order of the input pair of NLI samples is reversed in the fine-tuning phase, and other hyper-parameters and settings keep the same with the BERT paper. Table TABREF19 shows the accuracy on the validation set of the MNLI and QNLI datasets. For the BERTBase model, when the sentences are swapped, the accuracy decreases by 0.5% on the MNLI task and 0.4% on the QNLI task. These results confirm that BERT trained with NSP only is indeed affected by the input order. This phenomenon motivates us to make the NSP task symmetric. The results of BERT-PN verify that BERT-PN is order-invariant. When the input order is reversed, the performance of BERT-PN remains stable. These results indicate that our method is able to remedy the order-sensitivity problem.

Results of MRC Tasks ::: SQuAD v1.1 and v2.0
We also evaluate our method on the MRC tasks. The Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD v1.1) is a question answering (QA) dataset, which consists of 100K samples BIBREF15. Each data sample has a question and a corresponding Wikipedia passage that contains the answer. The goal is to extract the answer from the passage for the given question.
In the fine-tuning procedure, we follow the exact way the BERT performed. The output vectors are used to compute the score of tokens being start and end of the answer span. The valid span that has the maximum score is selected as the prediction. And similarly, the fine-tuning training was performed for 3 epochs with a learning rate of 3e-5.
Table TABREF26 demonstrates the results on the SQuAD v1.1 dataset. The comparison between BERTBase-PN and BERTBase indicates that the inclusion of the PSP subtask is beneficial (2.4% absolute improvement). When using BERTBase-PNsmth, another 0.3% increase in EM can be obtained. The experimental results on the SQuAD v2.0 BIBREF16 are also shown in Table. TABREF26. The SQuAD v2.0 differs from SQuAD v1.1 by allowing the question-paragraph pairs that have no answer. For SQuAD v2.0, our method also achieved about 4% absolute improvement in both EM and F1 against BERTBase.

Results of MRC Tasks ::: RACE
The ReAding Comprehension from Examinations (RACE) dataset BIBREF17 consists of 100K questions taken from English exams, and the answers are generated by human experts. This is one of the most challenging MRC datasets that require sophisticated reasoning.
In our implementation, the question, document, and option are concatenated as a single sequence, separated by [SEP] token. And each part is truncated by a maximal length of 40/432/40, respectively. The model computes for a concatenation a scalar as the score, which is then used in a softmax layer for the final prediction. The fine-tuning was conducted for 5 epochs, with a batch size of 32 and a learning rate of 5e-5. As shown in Table TABREF28, the proposed method significantly improve the performance on the RACE dataset. BERTBase-PN obtains 2.6% accuracy improvement, and BERTBase-PN5cls further brings 0.4% absolute gain.
The comparisons on the SQuAD v1.1, SQuAD v2.0, and RACE dataset demonstrate that the involvement of additional sentence and discourse information is not only beneficial for the NLI task but also the MRC task. This is reasonable as these tasks heavily rely on the global semantic understanding and sophisticated reasoning among sentences. And this ability can be effectively enhanced by our method.

Table 1: The accuracy of BERT and BERT-PN on the validation set of the MNLI and QNLI dataset. P&H denotes that the input is (premise, hypothesis), which is the order used in BERT. The reported accuracy is the average after 5 runs.

Table 3: The performance of various BERT models finetuned on the SQuAD v1.1 and v2.0 dataset. EM means the percentage of exact match. The results of RoBERTa is the DOC-SENTENCES version retrieved from Table 2 in (Liu et al. 2019).

Figure 2: The accuracy on evaluation set of HANS. It has six sub-components, each defined by its correct label and the heuristic it addresses.

Figure 3: Performance on thirty detailed sub-components of the HANS evaluation set (30K instances). Each sub-component is defined by three heuristics, i.e., Lexical overlap, Sub-sequence and Constituent. For instance, in prefix “ln” , “l” denotes lexical overlap heuristic, “n” denotes the non-entailment label. The suffix means a specific syntactic rule, e.g., subject/object swap means in the hypothesis sentence, the subject and the object are swapped.

Question: What BERT model do they test?
{"answer": ["BERTbase"], "evidence": ["This section gives detailed experiment settings. The method is evaluated on the BERTbase model, which has 12 layers, 12 self-attention heads with a hidden size of 768."]}