CLAIJan 30, 2023

Crawling the Internal Knowledge-Base of Language Models

DeepMind
arXiv:2301.12810v1316 citationsh-index: 59
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This addresses the need for interpretable knowledge representation in language models, which is crucial for downstream tasks, though it is an incremental advancement in knowledge extraction techniques.

The paper tackled the problem of representing the factual knowledge stored in language models by proposing a method to extract a knowledge-graph from them, achieving high precision of 82-92% in generated facts.

Language models are trained on large volumes of text, and as a result their parameters might contain a significant body of factual knowledge. Any downstream task performed by these models implicitly builds on these facts, and thus it is highly desirable to have means for representing this body of knowledge in an interpretable way. However, there is currently no mechanism for such a representation. Here, we propose to address this goal by extracting a knowledge-graph of facts from a given language model. We describe a procedure for ``crawling'' the internal knowledge-base of a language model. Specifically, given a seed entity, we expand a knowledge-graph around it. The crawling procedure is decomposed into sub-tasks, realized through specially designed prompts that control for both precision (i.e., that no wrong facts are generated) and recall (i.e., the number of facts generated). We evaluate our approach on graphs crawled starting from dozens of seed entities, and show it yields high precision graphs (82-92%), while emitting a reasonable number of facts per entity.

Foundations

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