Will LLMs Replace the Encoder-Only Models in Temporal Relation Classification?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Roccabruna, Gabriel, Rizzoli, Massimo, Riccardi, Giuseppe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Roccabruna, Gabriel
Rizzoli, Massimo
Riccardi, Giuseppe
author_facet Roccabruna, Gabriel
Rizzoli, Massimo
Riccardi, Giuseppe
contents The automatic detection of temporal relations among events has been mainly investigated with encoder-only models such as RoBERTa. Large Language Models (LLM) have recently shown promising performance in temporal reasoning tasks such as temporal question answering. Nevertheless, recent studies have tested the LLMs' performance in detecting temporal relations of closed-source models only, limiting the interpretability of those results. In this work, we investigate LLMs' performance and decision process in the Temporal Relation Classification task. First, we assess the performance of seven open and closed-sourced LLMs experimenting with in-context learning and lightweight fine-tuning approaches. Results show that LLMs with in-context learning significantly underperform smaller encoder-only models based on RoBERTa. Then, we delve into the possible reasons for this gap by applying explainable methods. The outcome suggests a limitation of LLMs in this task due to their autoregressive nature, which causes them to focus only on the last part of the sequence. Additionally, we evaluate the word embeddings of these two models to better understand their pre-training differences. The code and the fine-tuned models can be found respectively on GitHub.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_10476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Will LLMs Replace the Encoder-Only Models in Temporal Relation Classification?
Roccabruna, Gabriel
Rizzoli, Massimo
Riccardi, Giuseppe
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The automatic detection of temporal relations among events has been mainly investigated with encoder-only models such as RoBERTa. Large Language Models (LLM) have recently shown promising performance in temporal reasoning tasks such as temporal question answering. Nevertheless, recent studies have tested the LLMs' performance in detecting temporal relations of closed-source models only, limiting the interpretability of those results. In this work, we investigate LLMs' performance and decision process in the Temporal Relation Classification task. First, we assess the performance of seven open and closed-sourced LLMs experimenting with in-context learning and lightweight fine-tuning approaches. Results show that LLMs with in-context learning significantly underperform smaller encoder-only models based on RoBERTa. Then, we delve into the possible reasons for this gap by applying explainable methods. The outcome suggests a limitation of LLMs in this task due to their autoregressive nature, which causes them to focus only on the last part of the sequence. Additionally, we evaluate the word embeddings of these two models to better understand their pre-training differences. The code and the fine-tuned models can be found respectively on GitHub.
title Will LLMs Replace the Encoder-Only Models in Temporal Relation Classification?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10476