A recent trend in Natural Language Processing is the exponential growth in Language Model (LM) size, which prevents research groups without a necessary hardware infrastructure from participating in the development process. This study investigates methods for Knowledge Distillation (KD) to provide efficient alternatives to large-scale models. In this context, KD means extracting information about language encoded in a Neural Network and Lexical Knowledge Databases. We developed two methods to test our hypothesis that efficient architectures can gain knowledge from LMs and extract valuable information from lexical sources. First, we present a technique to learn confident probability distribution for Masked Language Modeling by prediction weighting of multiple teacher networks. Second, we propose a method for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and lexical KD that is general enough to be adapted to many LMs. Our results show that KD with multiple teachers leads to improved training convergence. When using our lexical pre-training method, LM characteristics are not lost, leading to increased performance in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks over the state-of-the-art while adding no parameters. Moreover, the improved semantic understanding of our model increased the task performance beyond WSD and NLU in a real-problem scenario (Plagiarism Detection). This study suggests that sophisticated training methods and network architectures can be superior over scaling trainable parameters. On this basis, we suggest the research area should encourage the development and use of efficient models and rate impacts resulting from growing LM size equally against task performance.

本研究探讨了一种Knowledge Distillation的新方法，即从神经网络和词汇知识库中提取语言信息，以提供大规模模型的高效替代方案，并提出了两种基于多个teacher networks预测权重的技术以及一种用于词义消歧的方法，并发现使用本文中的词汇预训练方法可在不增加参数的情况下提高自然语言理解任务(NLU)的性能，同时在Plagiarism Detection方面也有了更好的表现。

神经语言模型的一致性蒸馏架构