ReasonBERT

Code and pre-trained models for ReasonBert: Pre-trained to Reason with Distant Supervision, EMNLP'2021

Pretrained Models

The pretrained models are shared via Huggingface ModelHub (https://huggingface.co/osunlp). You can directly load them with Huggingface Transformers.

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
  
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("osunlp/ReasonBERT-RoBERTa-base")

model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("osunlp/ReasonBERT-RoBERTa-base")

Note that the tokenizers are identical to BERT/RoBERTa/TAPAS, with the extra <QUESTION> token appended in the end. Please refer to our paper for more details.

Pretraining Data

The pretraining data for both text-only and hybrid settings are shared on https://zenodo.org/record/5612316.

For details on preparing the pretraining data, please check data_processing and the paper.

Environment Setup

Dependencies

pandas==1.2.4
torch
transformers==4.3.3
webdataset==0.2.20
torch-scatter # You need to install pytorch first, then install the correct version of torch-scatter

Pretraining

You can pretrain the models with our, or your own pretraining data using pretrain.py (for text only setting), and hybrid_pretrain.py (for hybrid setting with tables). The configs are under configs/pretrain, you need to modify the batch_size based on your system configurations, and point the data/output path correctly. A demo script is under scripts/pretrain.sh. xla_spawn.py can be used to launch pretraining job on Google cloud TPUs, note that you need to set fp16=false for TPUs.

QA

You can download the data for MRQA experiments from the official repo. Note that we use the original training data for training (and dev if needed), and the original in-domain dev data for testing. The data directory should be specificed in configs/MRQA/configQA.json -> datadir.

We experiment under both few-shot and full-data setting. You can use the script below to run experiments for MRQA. See README under configs for more info.

MODEL=$1 #roberta-base; osunlp/ReasonBERT-RoBERTa-base; ...
DATASET=$2 #SQuAD; NewsQA; ...

MODEL_NAME=(${MODEL//// })
MODEL_NAME=${MODEL_NAME[-1]}

SEED=7 
SAMPLE=128 # number of training examples to sample, -1 will use all
echo $MODEL_NAME $DATASET
python train.py\
    --config ./configs/MRQA/configQA.json\
    --pretrain ${MODEL}\
    --sample ${SAMPLE}\
    --seed ${SEED}\
    --run_id ${MODEL_NAME}_${DATASET}_${SAMPLE}_${SEED}\
    --dataset ${DATASET}\
    --overwrite

Tips: The results reported in the paper are based on five random runs with seed 1/3/5/7/9. To reproduce the exact same results for our pretrained models, you need to first initialize the model with base PLM (roberta-base or bert-base), then load the weights of ReasonBERT (This is what we do when running the experiments with local pretrained checkpoints). Directly load ReasonBERT(like pass osunlp/ReasonBERT-RoBERTa-base in the script above) will have slightly different results as the random initizlization of QA headers are different.

TableQA

The data for TableQA on nqtables is under data/nqtables. We cast TableQA still as extractive QA task, but support using table-based encoder, e.g., tapas or ReasonBERT-tapas. The associated configs are under configs/nqtables, just change the datadir and save_dir accordingly. We use the same architecture, to avoid repeatitive preprocessing, you could download the tokenizer and point tokenizer to that location. Use bert_version to specify the encoder you want to use.

# This will use the tapas model, and train with 10% of data
python train.py -c configs/nqtables/configTableQA_tapas.json --run_id 0.1_1 --seed 1 --sample 0.1 --epochs 10 --warmup_steps 1 --eval_steps 3

# This will use basic roberta model, and treat tableQA as regular text QA task
python train.py -c configs/nqtables/configTableTextQA_roberta.json --run_id 0.1_1 --seed 1 --sample 0.1 --epochs 10 --warmup_steps 1 --eval_steps 3

Citation

@inproceedings{deng-etal-2021-reasonbert,
    title = "{R}eason{BERT}: {P}re-trained to Reason with Distant Supervision",
    author = "Deng, Xiang  and
      Su, Yu  and
      Lees, Alyssa  and
      Wu, You  and
      Yu, Cong  and
      Sun, Huan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.494",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.494",
    pages = "6112--6127",
}