# KALM: Knowledge-Aware Integration of Local, Document, and Global Contexts for Long Document Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04105 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04105/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 137 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [RotatE: Knowledge Graph Embedding by Relational Rotation in Complex Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10197/) (2019)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07129/) (2019)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [Composition-based Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03082/) (2019)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Knowledge Enhanced Contextual Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04164/) (2019)
- [Towards Understanding and Mitigating Social Biases in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13219/) (2021)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08387/) (2021)
- [Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02035/) (2021)
- [GreaseLM: Graph REASoning Enhanced Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08860/) (2022)
- [KG-BART: Knowledge Graph-Augmented BART for Generative Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12677/) (2020)
- [CoLAKE: Contextualized Language and Knowledge Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00309/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [FactKB: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation using Language Models Enhanced with Factual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08281/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Card: Filling LLMs' Knowledge Gaps with Plug-in Specialized Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09955/) (2023)
- [DELL: Generating Reactions and Explanations for LLM-Based Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10426/) (2024)
- [Graph2text or Graph2token: A Perspective of Large Language Models for Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01124/) (2025)
- [Bridging Legal Knowledge and AI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Vector Stores, Knowledge Graphs, and Hierarchical Non-negative Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20364/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Keyphrase Extractors: A Preliminary Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15156/) (2023)
- [A Unified Knowledge Graph Augmentation Service for Boosting Domain-specific NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05251/) (2022)
- [Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Contextual Language Representations for Domain Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06761/) (2023)
- [TRELM: Towards Robust and Efficient Pre-training for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11203/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the advent of pretrained language models (LMs), increasing research efforts have been focusing on infusing commonsense and domain-specific knowledge to prepare LMs for downstream tasks. These works attempt to leverage knowledge graphs, the de facto standard of symbolic knowledge representation, along with pretrained LMs. While existing approaches have leveraged external knowledge, it remains an open question how to jointly incorporate knowledge graphs representing varying contexts, from local (e.g., sentence), to document-level, to global knowledge, to enable knowledge-rich exchange across these contexts. Such rich contextualization can be especially beneficial for long document understanding tasks since standard pretrained LMs are typically bounded by the input sequence length. In light of these challenges, we propose KALM, a Knowledge-Aware Language Model that jointly leverages knowledge in local, document-level, and global contexts for long document understanding. KALM first encodes long documents and knowledge graphs into the three knowledge-aware context representations. It then processes each context with context-specific layers, followed by a context fusion layer that facilitates knowledge exchange to derive an overarching document representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KALM achieves state-of-the-art performance on six long document understanding tasks and datasets. Further analyses reveal that the three knowledge-aware contexts are complementary and they all contribute to model performance, while the importance and information exchange patterns of different contexts vary with respect to different tasks and datasets.