ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation

Jiacheng Ye, Jiahui Gao, Qintong Li, Hang Xu, Jiangtao Feng, Zhiyong Wu, Tao Yu, Lingpeng Kong


Abstract
There is a growing interest in dataset generation recently due to the superior generative capacity of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this paper, we study a flexible and efficient zero-short learning method, ZeroGen.Given a zero-shot task, we first generate a dataset from scratch using PLMs in an unsupervised manner. Then, we train a tiny task model (e.g., LSTM) under the supervision of the synthesized dataset. This approach allows highly efficient inference as the final task model only has orders of magnitude fewer parameters comparing to PLMs (e.g., GPT2-XL).Apart from being annotation-free and efficient, we argue that ZeroGen can also provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation, and unreferenced text generation evaluation. Experiments and analysis on different NLP tasks, namely, text classification, question answering, and natural language inference, show the effectiveness of ZeroGen.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.801
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11653–11669
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.801
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.801
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiacheng Ye, Jiahui Gao, Qintong Li, Hang Xu, Jiangtao Feng, Zhiyong Wu, Tao Yu, and Lingpeng Kong. 2022. ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11653–11669, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation (Ye et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.801.pdf