What is: MT-PET?

MT-PET is a multi-task version of Pattern Exploiting Training (PET) for exaggeration detection, which leverages knowledge from complementary cloze-style QA tasks to improve few-shot learning. It defines pairs of complementary pattern-verbalizer pairs for a main task and auxiliary task. These PVPs are then used to train PET on data from both tasks.

PET uses the masked language modeling objective of pretrained language models to transform a task into one or more cloze-style question answering tasks. In the original PET implementation, PVPs are defined for a single target task. MT-PET extends this by allowing for auxiliary PVPs from related tasks, adding complementary cloze-style QA tasks during training. The motivation for the multi-task approach is two-fold: 1) complementary cloze-style tasks can potentially help the model to learn different aspects of the main task, i.e. the similar tasks of exaggeration detection and claim strength prediction; 2) data on related tasks can be utilized during training, which is important in situations where data for the main task is limited.