Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

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Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask LearnersAlec Radford*1Jeffrey Wu*1Rewon Child1David Luan1Dario Amodei**1Ilya Sutskever**1AbstractNatural Language processing tasks, such as ques-tion answering, machine translation, reading com-prehension, and summarization, are typicallyapproached with supervised learning on task-specific datasets. We demonstrate that languagemodels begin to learn these tasks without any ex-plicit supervision when trained on a new datasetof millions of webpages called WebText. Whenconditioned on a document plus questions, the an-swers generated by the Language model reach 55F1 on the CoQA dataset - matching or exceedingthe performance of 3 out of 4 baseline systemswithout using the 127,000+ training capacity of the Language model is essentialto the success of zero-shot task transfer and in-creasing it improves performance in a log-linearfashion across tasks.

case by analyzing the performance of language models in a zero-shot setting on a wide variety of tasks. 2.1. Training Dataset Most prior work trained language models on a single do-main of text, such as news articles (Jozefowicz et al.,2016), Wikipedia (Merity et al.,2016), or fiction books (Kiros et al.,2015).

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