# Unified BERT for Few-shot Natural Language Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12094 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12094/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01057/) (2020)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [Muppet: Massive Multi-task Representations with Pre-Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11038/) (2021)
- [Named Entity Recognition as Dependency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07150/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Coattention Networks For Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01604/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Fengshenbang 1.0: Being the Foundation of Chinese Cognitive Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02970/) (2022)
- [SeqGPT: An Out-of-the-box Large Language Model for Open Domain Sequence Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10529/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Even as pre-trained language models share a semantic encoder, natural language understanding suffers from a diversity of output schemas. In this paper, we propose UBERT, a unified bidirectional language understanding model based on BERT framework, which can universally model the training objects of different NLU tasks through a biaffine network. Specifically, UBERT encodes prior knowledge from various aspects, uniformly constructing learning representations across multiple NLU tasks, which is conducive to enhancing the ability to capture common semantic understanding. By using the biaffine to model scores pair of the start and end position of the original text, various classification and extraction structures can be converted into a universal, span-decoding approach. Experiments show that UBERT wins the first price in the 2022 AIWIN - World Artificial Intelligence Innovation Competition, Chinese insurance few-shot multi-task track, and realizes the unification of extensive information extraction and linguistic reasoning tasks.