# Metadata Shaping: Natural Language Annotations for the Tail

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08430 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08430/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [Long Range Arena: A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04006/) (2020)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07129/) (2019)
- [KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06136/) (2019)
- [LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01057/) (2020)
- [K-Adapter: Infusing Knowledge into Pre-Trained Models with Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01808/) (2020)
- [K-BERT: Enabling Language Representation with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07606/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Enhanced Contextual Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04164/) (2019)
- [FewRel: A Large-Scale Supervised Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset with State-of-the-Art Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10147/) (2018)
- [How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08493/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07348/) (2019)
- [Robustness Gym: Unifying the NLP Evaluation Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04840/) (2021)
- [A Kernel Theory of Modern Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06084/) (2018)
- [Pretrained Encyclopedia: Weakly Supervised Knowledge-Pretrained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09637/) (2019)
- [E-BERT: Efficient-Yet-Effective Entity Embeddings for BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03681/) (2019)
- [TACRED Revisited: A Thorough Evaluation of the TACRED Relation Extraction Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14855/) (2020)
- [The Devil is in the Tails: Fine-grained Classification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01450/) (2017)
- [Ultra-Fine Entity Typing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04905/) (2018)
- [Data Noising as Smoothing in Neural Network Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02573/) (2017)
- [An Analysis of Simple Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11683/) (2020)
- [Barack's Wife Hillary: Using Knowledge-Graphs for Fact-Aware Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07241/) (2019)
- [HTLM: Hyper-Text Pre-Training and Prompting of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06955/) (2021)
- [DeepType: Multilingual Entity Linking by Neural Type System Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01021/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language models (LMs) have made remarkable progress, but still struggle to generalize beyond the training data to rare linguistic patterns. Since rare entities and facts are prevalent in the queries users submit to popular applications such as search and personal assistant systems, improving the ability of LMs to reliably capture knowledge over rare entities is a pressing challenge studied in significant prior work. Noticing that existing approaches primarily modify the LM architecture or introduce auxiliary objectives to inject useful entity knowledge, we ask to what extent we could match the quality of these architectures using a base LM architecture, and only changing the data? We propose metadata shaping, a method in which readily available metadata, such as entity descriptions and categorical tags, are appended to examples based on information theoretic metrics. Intuitively, if metadata corresponding to popular entities overlap with metadata for rare entities, the LM may be able to better reason about the rare entities using patterns learned from similar popular entities. On standard entity-rich tasks (TACRED, FewRel, OpenEntity), with no changes to the LM whatsoever, metadata shaping exceeds the BERT-baseline by up to 5.3 F1 points, and achieves or competes with state-of-the-art results. We further show the improvements are up to 10x larger on examples containing tail versus popular entities.