Chain-of-Thought Tuning: Masked Language Models can also Think Step By Step in Natural Language Understanding

Caoyun Fan, Jidong Tian, Yitian Li, Wenqing Chen, Hao He, Yaohui Jin


Abstract
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning through intermediate steps in natural language form. Briefly, CoT enables LLMs to think step by step. However, although many Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks also require thinking step by step, LLMs perform less well than small-scale Masked Language Models (MLMs). To migrate CoT from LLMs to MLMs, we propose Chain-of-Thought Tuning (CoTT), a two-step reasoning framework based on prompt tuning, to implement step-by-step thinking for MLMs on NLU tasks. From the perspective of CoT, CoTT’s two-step framework enables MLMs to implement task decomposition; CoTT’s prompt tuning allows intermediate steps to be used in natural language form. Thereby, the success of CoT can be extended to NLU tasks through MLMs. To verify the effectiveness of CoTT, we conduct experiments on two NLU tasks: hierarchical classification and relation extraction, and the results show that CoTT outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.913
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14774–14785
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.913
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.913
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Caoyun Fan, Jidong Tian, Yitian Li, Wenqing Chen, Hao He, and Yaohui Jin. 2023. Chain-of-Thought Tuning: Masked Language Models can also Think Step By Step in Natural Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14774–14785, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chain-of-Thought Tuning: Masked Language Models can also Think Step By Step in Natural Language Understanding (Fan et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.913.pdf
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