SiBert: Enhanced Chinese Pre-trained Language Model with Sentence Insertion

Pre-trained models have achieved great success in learning unsupervised language representations by self-supervised tasks on large-scale corpora. Recent studies mainly focus on how to fine-tune different downstream tasks from a general pre-trained model. However, some studies show that customized self-supervised tasks for a particular type of downstream task can effectively help the pre-trained model to capture more corresponding knowledge and semantic information. Hence a new pre-training task called Sentence Insertion (SI) is proposed in this paper for Chinese query-passage pairs NLP tasks including answer span prediction, retrieval question answering and sentence level cloze test. The related experiment results indicate that the proposed SI can improve the performance of the Chinese Pretrained models significantly. Moreover, a word segmentation method called SentencePiece is utilized to further enhance Chinese Bert performance for tasks with long texts.