Abstract

Modern learning architectures for natural language processing have been very successful in incorporating a huge amount of texts into their parameters. However, by and large, such models store and use knowledge in distributed and decentralized ways. This proves unreliable and makes the models ill-suited for knowledge-intensive tasks that require reasoning over factual information in linguistic expressions.  In this talk, I will give a few examples of exploring alternative architectures to tackle those challenges. In particular, we can improve the performance of such (language) models by representing, storing and accessing knowledge in a dedicated memory component.

This talk is based on several joint works with Yury Zemlyanskiy (Google Research), Michiel de Jong (USC and Google Research), William Cohen (Google Research and CMU) and our other collaborators in Google Research.

Biography

Fei is a research scientist at Google Research. Before that, he was a Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern California. His primary research interests are machine learning and its application to various AI problems: speech and language processing, computer vision, robotics and recently weather forecast and climate modeling.   He has a PhD (2007) from Computer and Information Science from U. of Pennsylvania and B.Sc and M.Sc in Biomedical Engineering from Southeast University (Nanjing, China).

Abstract

The use of NLP in the realm of financial technology is broad and complex, with applications ranging from sentiment analysis and named entity recognition to question answering. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective on a variety of tasks; however, no LLM specialized for the financial domain has been reported in the literature. In this work, we present BloombergGPT, a 50 billion parameter language model that is trained on a wide range of financial data. We construct a 363 billion token dataset based on Bloomberg’s extensive data sources, perhaps the largest domain-specific dataset yet, augmented with 345 billion tokens from general-purpose datasets.  We validate BloombergGPT on standard LLM benchmarks, open financial benchmarks, and a suite of internal benchmarks that most accurately reflect our intended usage. Our mixed dataset training leads to a model that outperforms existing models on financial tasks by significant margins without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks. Additionally, we explain our modeling choices, training process, and evaluation methodology.

Biography

Mark Dredze is the John C Malone Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of Research (Foundations of AI) for the JHU AI-X Foundry. He develops Artificial Intelligence Systems based on natural language processing and explores applications to public health and medicine.

Prof. Dredze is affiliated with the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, the Center for Language and Speech Processing, among others. He holds a joint appointment in the Biomedical Informatics & Data Science Section (BIDS), under the Department of Medicine (DOM), Division of General Internal Medicine (GIM) in the School of Medicine. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.