Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Jiexin, Jatowt, Adam, Cai, Yi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01863
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910858837229568
author Wang, Jiexin
Jatowt, Adam
Cai, Yi
author_facet Wang, Jiexin
Jatowt, Adam
Cai, Yi
contents In the evolving field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), understanding the temporal context of text is increasingly critical for applications requiring advanced temporal reasoning. Traditional pre-trained language models like BERT, which rely on synchronic document collections such as BookCorpus and Wikipedia, often fall short in effectively capturing and leveraging temporal information. To address this limitation, we introduce BiTimeBERT 2.0, a novel time-aware language model pre-trained on a temporal news article collection. BiTimeBERT 2.0 incorporates temporal information through three innovative pre-training objectives: Extended Time-Aware Masked Language Modeling (ETAMLM), Document Dating (DD), and Time-Sensitive Entity Replacement (TSER). Each objective is specifically designed to target a distinct dimension of temporal information: ETAMLM enhances the model's understanding of temporal contexts and relations, DD integrates document timestamps as explicit chronological markers, and TSER focuses on the temporal dynamics of "Person" entities. Moreover, our refined corpus preprocessing strategy reduces training time by nearly 53\%, making BiTimeBERT 2.0 significantly more efficient while maintaining high performance. Experimental results show that BiTimeBERT 2.0 achieves substantial improvements across a broad range of time-related tasks and excels on datasets spanning extensive temporal ranges. These findings underscore BiTimeBERT 2.0's potential as a powerful tool for advancing temporal reasoning in NLP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_01863
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Effective Time-Aware Language Representation: Exploring Enhanced Temporal Understanding in Language Models
Wang, Jiexin
Jatowt, Adam
Cai, Yi
Computation and Language
In the evolving field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), understanding the temporal context of text is increasingly critical for applications requiring advanced temporal reasoning. Traditional pre-trained language models like BERT, which rely on synchronic document collections such as BookCorpus and Wikipedia, often fall short in effectively capturing and leveraging temporal information. To address this limitation, we introduce BiTimeBERT 2.0, a novel time-aware language model pre-trained on a temporal news article collection. BiTimeBERT 2.0 incorporates temporal information through three innovative pre-training objectives: Extended Time-Aware Masked Language Modeling (ETAMLM), Document Dating (DD), and Time-Sensitive Entity Replacement (TSER). Each objective is specifically designed to target a distinct dimension of temporal information: ETAMLM enhances the model's understanding of temporal contexts and relations, DD integrates document timestamps as explicit chronological markers, and TSER focuses on the temporal dynamics of "Person" entities. Moreover, our refined corpus preprocessing strategy reduces training time by nearly 53\%, making BiTimeBERT 2.0 significantly more efficient while maintaining high performance. Experimental results show that BiTimeBERT 2.0 achieves substantial improvements across a broad range of time-related tasks and excels on datasets spanning extensive temporal ranges. These findings underscore BiTimeBERT 2.0's potential as a powerful tool for advancing temporal reasoning in NLP.
title Towards Effective Time-Aware Language Representation: Exploring Enhanced Temporal Understanding in Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01863