BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova


Abstract
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models (Peters et al., 2018a; Radford et al., 2018), BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5 (7.7 point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).
Anthology ID:
N19-1423
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4171–4186
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1423
Award:
 Best Long Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2019. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 4171–4186, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (Devlin et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/365139010
Code
 google-research/bert +  additional community code
Data
AstockCPEDCoLACoNLLCoNLL 2003CoQADBpediaGLUEMRPCMRQAManyTypes4TypeScriptMultiNLIMultiRCNCBI DiseasePIQAPhotoChatQNLIQuora Question PairsRTEReCoRDSQuADSSTSST-2STS BenchmarkSWAGSciERCSentEvalTriviaQAWNLIWSCXNLI