Large “instruction-tuned” language models (i.e., finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is often limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off their own generations. Our pipeline generates instructions, input, and output samples from a language model, then filters invalid or similar ones before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to the vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT-001, which was trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT-001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions

How well can NLP models generalize to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with task instructions? To address this question, we first introduce Super-NaturalInstructions, a benchmark of 1,616 diverse NLP tasks and their expert-written instructions. Our collection covers 76 distinct task types, including but not limited to classification, extraction, infilling, sequence tagging, text rewriting, and text composition. This large and diverse collection of tasks enables rigorous benchmarking of cross-task generalization under instructions—training models to follow instructions on a subset of tasks and evaluating them on the remaining unseen ones.Furthermore, we build Tk-Instruct, a transformer model trained to follow a variety of in-context instructions (plain language task definitions or k-shot examples). Our experiments show that Tk-Instruct outperforms existing instruction-following models such as InstructGPT by over 9% on our benchmark despite being an order of magnitude smaller. We further analyze generalization as a function of various scaling parameters, such as the number of observed tasks, the number of instances per task, and model sizes. We hope our dataset and model facilitate future progress towards more general-purpose NLP models.

Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor

For a long time, different recommendation tasks require designing task-specific architectures and training objectives. As a result, it is hard to transfer the knowledge and representations from one task to another, thus restricting the generalization ability of existing recommendation approaches. To deal with such issues, considering that language can describe almost anything and language grounding is a powerful medium to represent various problems or tasks, we present a flexible and unified text-to-text paradigm called “Pretrain, Personalized Prompt, and Predict Paradigm” (P5) for recommendation, which unifies various recommendation tasks in a shared framework. In P5, all data such as user-item interactions, user descriptions, item metadata, and user reviews are converted to a common format — natural language sequences. The rich information from natural language assists P5 to capture deeper semantics for personalization and recommendation. Specifically, P5 learns different tasks with the same language modeling objective during pretraining. Thus, it serves as the foundation model for various downstream recommendation tasks, allows easy integration with other modalities, and enables instruction-based recommendation. P5 advances recommender systems from shallow model to deep model to big model, and will revolutionize the technical form of recommender systems towards universal recommendation engine. With adaptive personalized prompt for different users, P5 is able to make predictions in a zero-shot or few-shot manner and largely reduces the necessity for extensive fine-tuning. On several benchmarks, we conduct experiments to show the effectiveness of P5. To help advance future research on Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP), Personalized Foundation Models (PFM), and Universal Recommendation Engine (URE), we release the source code, dataset, prompts, and pretrained P5 model at https://github.com/jeykigung/P5.

Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)

How can we measure the generalization of models to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with their language instructions? To facilitate progress in this goal, we introduce N ATURAL -I NSTRUCTIONS v 2 , a collection of 1,600+ diverse language tasks and their expert written instructions. More impor-tantly, the benchmark covers 70+ distinct task types, such as tagging, in-ﬁlling, and rewriting. This benchmark is collected with contributions

Benchmarking Generalization via In-Context Instructions on 1, 600+ Language Tasks

Much previous work has been done in attempting to identify humor in text. In this paper we extend that capability by proposing a new task: assessing whether or not a joke is humorous. We present a novel way of approaching this problem by building a model that learns to identify humorous jokes based on ratings gleaned from Reddit pages, consisting of almost 16,000 labeled instances. Using these ratings to determine the level of humor, we then employ a Transformer architecture for its advantages in learning from sentence context. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and show results that are comparable to human performance. We further demonstrate our model’s increased capabilities on humor identification problems, such as the previously created datasets for short jokes and puns. These experiments show that this method outperforms all previous work done on these tasks, with an F-measure of 93.1% for the Puns dataset and 98.6% on the Short Jokes dataset.

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Humor Detection: A Transformer Gets the Last Laugh

Typically, machine learning systems solve new tasks by training on thousands of examples. In contrast, humans can solve new tasks by reading some instructions, with perhaps an example or two. To take a step toward closing this gap, we introduce a framework for developing NLP systems that solve new tasks after reading their descriptions, synthesizing prior work in this area. We instantiate this frame- work with a new English language dataset, ZEST, structured for task-oriented evaluation on unseen tasks. Formulating task descriptions as questions, we ensure each is general enough to apply to many possible inputs, thus comprehensively evaluating a model’s ability to solve each task. Moreover, the dataset’s structure tests specific types of systematic generalization. We find that the state-of-the-art T5 model achieves a score of 12% on ZEST, leaving a significant challenge for NLP researchers.

Learning from Task Descriptions

Much previous work has been done in attempting to identify humor in text. In this paper we extend that capability by proposing a new task: assessing whether or not a joke is humorous. We present a novel way of approaching this problem by building a model that learns to identify humorous jokes based on ratings gleaned from Reddit pages, consisting of almost 16,000 labeled instances. Using these ratings to determine the level of humor, we then employ a Transformer architecture for its advantages in learning from sentence context. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and show results that are comparable to human performance. We further demonstrate our model's increased capabilities on humor identification problems, such as the previously created datasets for short jokes and puns. These experiments show that this method outperforms all previous work done on these tasks, with an F-measure of 93.1% for the Puns dataset and 98.6% on the Short Jokes dataset.

Humor is a complicated language phenomenon that depends upon many factors, including topic, date, and recipient. Because of this variation, it can be hard to determine what exactly makes a joke humorous, leading to difficulties in joke identification and related tasks. Furthermore, current humor datasets are lacking in both joke variety and size, with almost all current datasets having less than 100k jokes. In order to alleviate this issue we compile a collection of over 550,000 jokes posted over an 11 year period on the Reddit r/Jokes subreddit (an online forum), providing a large scale humor dataset that can easily be used for a myriad of tasks. This dataset also provides quantitative metrics for the level of humor in each joke, as determined by subreddit user feedback. We explore this dataset through the years, examining basic statistics, most mentioned entities, and sentiment proportions. We also introduce this dataset as a task for future work, where models learn to predict the level of humor in a joke. On that task we provide strong state-of-the-art baseline models and show room for future improvement. We hope that this dataset will not only help those researching computational humor, but also help social scientists who seek to understand popular culture through humor.

The rJokes Dataset: a Large Scale Humor Collection

Since the advent of Federated Learning (FL), research has applied these methods to natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite a plethora of papers in FL for NLP, no previous works have studied how multilingual text impacts FL algorithms. Furthermore, multilingual text provides an interesting avenue to examine the impact of non-IID text (e.g. different languages) on FL in naturally occurring data. We explore three multilingual language tasks, language modeling, machine translation, and text classification using differing federated and non-federated learning algorithms. Our results show that using pretrained models reduces the negative effects of FL, helping them to perform near or better than centralized (no privacy) learning, even when using non-IID partitioning.

Orion Weller

Papers

Humor Detection: A Transformer Gets the Last Laugh

Learning from Task Descriptions

Humor Detection: A Transformer Gets the Last Laugh

The rJokes Dataset: a Large Scale Humor Collection

Pretrained Models for Multilingual Federated Learning