Document Structure in Long Document Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Buchmann, Jan, Eichler, Max, Bodensohn, Jan-Micha, Kuznetsov, Ilia, Gurevych, Iryna
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Buchmann, Jan
Eichler, Max
Bodensohn, Jan-Micha
Kuznetsov, Ilia
Gurevych, Iryna
author_facet Buchmann, Jan
Eichler, Max
Bodensohn, Jan-Micha
Kuznetsov, Ilia
Gurevych, Iryna
contents Long documents often exhibit structure with hierarchically organized elements of different functions, such as section headers and paragraphs. Despite the omnipresence of document structure, its role in natural language processing (NLP) remains opaque. Do long-document Transformer models acquire an internal representation of document structure during pre-training? How can structural information be communicated to a model after pre-training, and how does it influence downstream performance? To answer these questions, we develop a novel suite of probing tasks to assess structure-awareness of long-document Transformers, propose general-purpose structure infusion methods, and evaluate the effects of structure infusion on QASPER and Evidence Inference, two challenging long-document NLP tasks. Results on LED and LongT5 suggest that they acquire implicit understanding of document structure during pre-training, which can be further enhanced by structure infusion, leading to improved end-task performance. To foster research on the role of document structure in NLP modeling, we make our data and code publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_17658
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Document Structure in Long Document Transformers
Buchmann, Jan
Eichler, Max
Bodensohn, Jan-Micha
Kuznetsov, Ilia
Gurevych, Iryna
Computation and Language
Long documents often exhibit structure with hierarchically organized elements of different functions, such as section headers and paragraphs. Despite the omnipresence of document structure, its role in natural language processing (NLP) remains opaque. Do long-document Transformer models acquire an internal representation of document structure during pre-training? How can structural information be communicated to a model after pre-training, and how does it influence downstream performance? To answer these questions, we develop a novel suite of probing tasks to assess structure-awareness of long-document Transformers, propose general-purpose structure infusion methods, and evaluate the effects of structure infusion on QASPER and Evidence Inference, two challenging long-document NLP tasks. Results on LED and LongT5 suggest that they acquire implicit understanding of document structure during pre-training, which can be further enhanced by structure infusion, leading to improved end-task performance. To foster research on the role of document structure in NLP modeling, we make our data and code publicly available.
title Document Structure in Long Document Transformers
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17658