PALM: Pre-training an AutoencodingAutoregressive Language Model for Context-conditioned Generation

摘要

Self-supervised pre-training, such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), MASS (Song et al., 2019) and BART (Lewis et al., 2019), has emerged as a powerful technique for natural language understanding and generation. Existing pre-training techniques employ au-toencoding and/or autoregressive objectives to train Transformer-based models by recovering original word tokens from corrupted text with some masked tokens. The training goals of existing techniques are often inconsistent with the goals of many language generation tasks, such as generative question answering and conversational response generation, for producing new text given context. This work presents PALM with a novel scheme that jointly pre-trains an autoencod-ing and autoregressive language model on a large unlabclcd corpus, specifically designed for generating new text conditioned on context. The new scheme alleviates the mismatch introduced by the existing denoising scheme between pre-training and fine-tuning where generation is more than reconstructing original text. An extensive set of experiments show that PALM achieves new state-of-the-art results on a variety of language generation benchmarks covering generative question answering (Rank 1 on the official MARCO leaderboard), abstractive summarization on CNN/DailyMail as well as Gigaword, question generation on SQuAD, and conversational response generation on Cornell Movie Dialogues.