Pre-trained language models (PLMs) aim to learn universal language representations by conducting self-supervised training tasks on large-scale corpora. Since PLMs capture word semantics in different contexts, the quality of word representations highly depends on word frequency, which usually follows a heavy-tailed distributions in the pre-training corpus. Therefore, the embeddings of rare words on the tail are usually poorly optimized. In this work, we focus on enhancing language model pre-training by leveraging definitions of the rare words in dictionaries (e.g., Wiktionary). To incorporate a rare word definition as a part of input, we fetch its definition from the dictionary and append it to the end of the input text sequence. In addition to training with the masked language modeling objective, we propose two novel self-supervised pre-training tasks on word and sentence-level alignment between input text sequence and rare word definitions to enhance language modeling representation with dictionary. We evaluate the proposed Dict-BERT model on the language understanding benchmark GLUE and eight specialized domain benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Dict-BERT can significantly improve the understanding of rare words and boost model performance on various NLP downstream tasks. 
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                            Tile2Vec: Unsupervised Representation Learning for Spatially Distributed Data
                        
                    
    
            Geospatial analysis lacks methods like the word vector representations and pre-trained networks that significantly boost performance across a wide range of natural language and computer vision tasks. To fill this gap, we introduce Tile2Vec, an unsupervised representation learning algorithm that extends the distributional hypothesis from natural language — words appearing in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings — to spatially distributed data. We demonstrate empirically that Tile2Vec learns semantically meaningful representations for both image and non-image datasets. Our learned representations significantly improve performance in downstream classification tasks and, similarly to word vectors, allow visual analogies to be obtained via simple arithmetic in the latent space. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 1651565
- PAR ID:
- 10136100
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 33
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3967 to 3974
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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