Semantic Midtuning of Language Encoders

Frank Ferraro, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Mohammad Umair, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Language encoders are deep neural nets with sequence-to-sequence architecture that enables transfer learning and parallelization, reducing training time greatly. In this project, we apply semantic midtuning on different language encoders, where we take a pre-trained encoder and perform the same pre-training steps on it, but with a different domain/corpus. Semantic midtuning is applied on a number of transformers including BERT and several of its modifications like SBERT, SemBERT etc and the performance is tested on several known datasets like FEVER, GLUE, SUPERGLUE, and SQUAD.