This code is implement for our EMNLP 2021's paper 《TransPrompt：Towards an Automatic Transferable Prompting Framework for Few-shot Text Classification》.

Our proposed TransPrompt is motivated by the join of prompt-tuning and cross-task transfer learning. The aim is to explore and exploit the transferable knowledge from similar tasks in the few-shot scenario, and make the Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) better few-shot transfer learner. Our proposed framework is accepted by the main conference (long paper track) in EMNLP-2021. This code is the default multi-GPU version. We will teach you how to use our code in the following parts.

Ps: This project is also committed at Alibaba EasyNLP(阿里云PAI). We will very HAPPY if you star and fork our projects!

We follow PET to use the same dataset. Please run the scripts to download the data:

sh data/download_data.sh

or manually download the dataset from https://nlp.cs.princeton.edu/projects/lm-bff/datasets.tar.

Then you will obtain a new director data/original

Our work has two kind of scenario, such as single-task and cross-task. Different kind scenario has corresponding splited examples. Defaultly, we generate few-shot learning examples, you can also generate full data by edit the parameter (-scene=full). We only demostrate the few-shot data generation.

Please run the scripts to obtain the single-task few-shot examples:

python3 data_utils/generate_k_shot_data.py --scene few-shot --k 16

Then you will obtain a new folder data/k-shot-single

Run the scripts

python3 data_utils/generate_k_shot_cross_task_data.py --scene few-shot --k 16

and you will obtain a new folder data/k-shot-cross

After the generation, the similar tasks will be divided into the same group. We have three groups:

• Group1 (Sentiment Analysis): SST-2, MR, CR
• Group2 (Natural Language Inference): MNLI, SNLI
• Group3 (Paraphrasing): MRPC, QQP

Please follow our papers, we have mask following experiments:

• Single-task few-shot learning: It is the same as LM-BFF and P-tuning, we prompt-tune the PLM only on one task.
• Cross-task few-shot learning: We mix up the similar task in group. At first, we prompt-tune the PLM on cross-task data, then we prompt-tune on each task again. For the Cross-task Learning, we have two cross-task method:
• (Cross-)Task Adaptation: In one group, we prompt-tune on all the tasks, and then evaluate on each task both in few-shot scenario.
• (Cross-)Task Generalization: In one group, we randomly choose one task for few-shot evaluation (do not used for training), others are used for prompt-tuning.

Take MRPC as an example, please run:

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 sh scripts/run_single_task.sh

Take Group1 as an example, please run the scripts:

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 sh scripts/run_cross_task_adaptation.sh

Also take Group1 as an example, please run the scripts: Ps: the unseen task is SST-2.

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 sh scripts/run_cross_task_generalization.sh

Our paper citation is:

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/emnlp/0001WQH021,
  author    = {Chengyu Wang and
               Jianing Wang and
               Minghui Qiu and
               Jun Huang and
               Ming Gao},
  editor    = {Marie{-}Francine Moens and
               Xuanjing Huang and
               Lucia Specia and
               Scott Wen{-}tau Yih},
  title     = {TransPrompt: Towards an Automatic Transferable Prompting Framework
               for Few-shot Text Classification},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
               Language Processing, {EMNLP} 2021, Virtual Event / Punta Cana, Dominican
               Republic, 7-11 November, 2021},
  pages     = {2792--2802},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year      = {2021},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.221},
  timestamp = {Tue, 09 Nov 2021 13:51:50 +0100},
  biburl    = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/emnlp/0001WQH021.bib},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}

The code is developed based on pet. We appreciate all the authors who made their code public, which greatly facilitates this project. This repository would be continuously updated.