Language models (LMs) have made remarkable progress, but still struggle to generalize beyond the training data to rare linguistic patterns. Since rare entities and facts are prevalent in the queries users submit to popular applications such as search and personal assistant systems, improving the ability of LMs to reliably capture knowledge over rare entities is a pressing challenge studied in significant prior work. Noticing that existing approaches primarily modify the LM architecture or introduce auxiliary objectives to inject useful entity knowledge, we ask to what extent we could match the quality of these architectures using a base LM architecture, and only changing the data? We propose metadata shaping, a method in which readily available metadata, such as entity descriptions and categorical tags, are appended to examples based on information theoretic metrics. Intuitively, if metadata corresponding to popular entities overlap with metadata for rare entities, the LM may be able to better reason about the rare entities using patterns learned from similar popular entities. On standard entity-rich tasks (TACRED, FewRel, OpenEntity), with no changes to the LM whatsoever, metadata shaping exceeds the BERT-baseline by up to 5.3 F1 points, and achieves or competes with state-of-the-art results. We further show the improvements are up to 10x larger on examples containing tail versus popular entities.

Popular language models (LMs) struggle to capture knowledge about rare tail facts and entities. Since widely used systems such as search and personal-assistants must support the long tail of entities that users ask about, there has been significant effort towards enhancing these base LMs with factual knowledge. We observe proposed methods typically start with a base LM and data that has been annotated with entity metadata, then change the model, by modifying the architecture or introducing auxiliary loss terms to better capture entity knowledge. In this work, we question this typical process and ask to what extent can we match the quality of model modifications, with a simple alternative: using a base LM and only changing the data. We propose metadata shaping, a method which inserts substrings corresponding to the readily available entity metadata, e.g. types and descriptions, into examples at train and inference time based on mutual information. Despite its simplicity, metadata shaping is quite effective. On standard evaluation benchmarks for knowledge-enhanced LMs, the method exceeds the base-LM baseline by an average of 4.3 F1 points and achieves state-of-the-art results. We further show the gains are on average 4.4x larger for the slice of examples containing tail vs. popular entities.