Cost-effective Selection of Pretraining Data: A Case Study of Pretraining BERT on Social Media

Xiang Dai, Sarvnaz Karimi, Ben Hachey, Cecile Paris

2020-10-02Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020Clinical Concept Extraction

Abstract

Recent studies on domain-specific BERT models show that effectiveness on downstream tasks can be improved when models are pretrained on in-domain data. Often, the pretraining data used in these models are selected based on their subject matter, e.g., biology or computer science. Given the range of applications using social media text, and its unique language variety, we pretrain two models on tweets and forum text respectively, and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of these two resources. In addition, we investigate how similarity measures can be used to nominate in-domain pretraining data. We publicly release our pretrained models at https://bit.ly/35RpTf0.

Results

TaskDatasetMetricValueModel
Clinical Concept Extraction2010 i2b2/VAExact Span F187.4ClinicalBERT

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