Chain-of-Thought Tuning: Masked Language Models can also Think Step By Step in Natural Language Understanding
Submission Type: Regular Long Paper
Submission Track: Machine Learning for NLP
Submission Track 2: Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Document Level, Textual Inference, etc.
Keywords: masked language models, multi-step reasoning, Chain-of-Thought, natural language understanding
TL;DR: We propose Chain-of-Thought Tuning (CoTT), a two-step reasoning framework based on prompt tuning to implement step-by-step thinking for MLMs on NLU tasks.
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning through intermediate steps in natural language form. Briefly, CoT enables LLMs to think step by step. However, although many Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks also require thinking step by step, LLMs perform less well than small-scale Masked Language Models (MLMs). To migrate CoT from LLMs to MLMs, we propose Chain-of-Thought Tuning (CoTT), a two-step reasoning framework based on prompt tuning, to implement step-by-step thinking for MLMs on NLU tasks. From the perspective of CoT, CoTT's two-step framework enables MLMs to implement task decomposition; CoTT's prompt tuning allows intermediate steps to be used in natural language form. Thereby, the success of CoT can be extended to NLU tasks through MLMs. To verify the effectiveness of CoTT, we conduct experiments on two NLU tasks: hierarchical classification and relation extraction, and the results show that CoTT outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Submission Number: 2612
Loading