Recently, pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various language understanding tasks, which indicates that pre-training on large-scale corpora may play a crucial role in natural language processing. Current pre-training procedures usually focus on training the model with several simple tasks to grasp the co-occurrence of words or sentences. However, besides co-occurring, there exists other valuable lexical, syntactic and semantic information in training corpora, such as named entity, semantic closeness and discourse relations. In order to extract to the fullest extent, the lexical, syntactic and semantic information from training corpora, we propose a continual pre-training framework named ERNIE 2.0 which builds and learns incrementally pre-training tasks through constant multi-task learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE 2.0 outperforms BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks including English tasks on GLUE benchmarks and several common tasks in Chinese. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

提出一种名为ERNIE 2.0的持续预训练框架，通过不断的多任务学习构建和学习预训练任务，以从训练语料库中提取词汇、句法和语义信息。实验结果表明，在包括GLUE基准测试中的16个任务（包括英文任务和中文中的几个常见任务）中，ERNIE 2.0的表现优于BERT和XLNet。已经在https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE发布了源代码和预训练模型。

ERNIE 2.0：面向语言理解的持续预训练框架