Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has significantly improved the performances of many natural language processing tasks. However, pre-trained language models are usually computationally expensive, so it is difficult to efficiently execute them on resourcerestricted devices. To accelerate inference and reduce model size while maintaining accuracy, we first propose a novel Transformer distillation method that is specially designed for knowledge distillation (KD) of the Transformer-based models. By leveraging this new KD method, the plenty of knowledge encoded in a large "teacher" BERT can be effectively transferred to a small "student" Tiny-BERT. Then, we introduce a new two-stage learning framework for TinyBERT, which performs Transformer distillation at both the pretraining and task-specific learning stages. This framework ensures that TinyBERT can capture the general-domain as well as the task-specific knowledge in BERT. TinyBERT 41 with 4 layers is empirically effective and achieves more than 96.8% the performance of its teacher BERT BASE on GLUE benchmark, while being 7.5x smaller and 9.4x faster on inference. TinyBERT 4 is also significantly better than 4-layer state-of-the-art baselines on BERT distillation, with only ∼28% parameters and ∼31% inference time of them. Moreover, TinyBERT 6 with 6 layers performs on-par with its teacher BERT BASE .

Neural language representation models such as BERT pre-trained on large-scale corpora can well capture rich semantic patterns from plain text, and be fine-tuned to consistently improve the performance of various NLP tasks. However, the existing pre-trained language models rarely consider incorporating knowledge graphs (KGs), which can provide rich structured knowledge facts for better language understanding. We argue that informative entities in KGs can enhance language representation with external knowledge. In this paper, we utilize both large-scale textual corpora and KGs to train an enhanced language representation model (ERNIE), which can take full advantage of lexical, syntactic, and knowledge information simultaneously. The experimental results have demonstrated that ERNIE achieves significant improvements on various knowledge-driven tasks, and meanwhile is comparable with the state-of-the-art model BERT on other common NLP tasks. The source code and experiment details of this paper can be obtained from https:// github.com/thunlp/ERNIE. * indicates equal contribution † Corresponding author: Z.Liu(liuzy@tsinghua.edu.cn) is_a is_a Song Book a u th o r c o m p o s e r Bob Dylan Chronicles: Volume One Blowin' in the wind Songwriter Writer is_a is_a Bob Dylan wrote

Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has significantly improved the performances of many natural language processing tasks. However, the pre-trained language models are usually computationally expensive and memory intensive, so it is difficult to effectively execute them on resource-restricted devices. To accelerate inference and reduce model size while maintaining accuracy, we firstly propose a novel Transformer distillation method that is specially designed for knowledge distillation (KD) of the Transformer-based models. By leveraging this new KD method, the plenty of knowledge encoded in a large "teacher" BERT can be well transferred to a small "student" TinyBERT. Moreover, we introduce a new two-stage learning framework for TinyBERT, which performs Transformer distillation at both the pre-training and task-specific learning stages. This framework ensures that TinyBERT can capture the general-domain as well as the task-specific knowledge in BERT. TinyBERT 1 is empirically effective and achieves more than 96% the performance of teacher BERT BASE on GLUE benchmark, while being 7.5x smaller and 9.4x faster on inference. TinyBERT is also significantly better than state-of-the-art baselines on BERT distillation, with only ∼28% parameters and ∼31% inference time of them.

Automatic generation of paraphrases from a given sentence is an important yet challenging task in natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to paraphrase generation. Specifically, we propose a new framework for the task, which consists of a generator and an evaluator, both of which are learned from data. The generator, built as a sequenceto-sequence learning model, can produce paraphrases given a sentence. The evaluator, constructed as a deep matching model, can judge whether two sentences are paraphrases of each other. The generator is first trained by deep learning and then further fine-tuned by reinforcement learning in which the reward is given by the evaluator. For the learning of the evaluator, we propose two methods based on supervised learning and inverse reinforcement learning respectively, depending on the type of available training data. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the proposed models (the generators) can produce more accurate paraphrases and outperform the stateof-the-art methods in paraphrase generation in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

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