TimeLMs: Diachronic Language Models from Twitter

Abstract

Despite its importance, the time variable has been largely neglected in the NLP and language model literature. In this paper, we present TimeLMs, a set of language models specialized on diachronic Twitter data. We show that a continual learning strategy contributes to enhancing Twitter-based language models′ capacity to deal with future and out-of-distribution tweets, while making them competitive with standardized and more monolithic benchmarks. We also perform a number of qualitative analyses showing how they cope with trends and peaks in activity involving specific named entities or concept drift. TimeLMs is available at github.com/cardiffnlp/timelms.

Type
Publication
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Daniel Loureiro
Daniel Loureiro
Postdoc
Luis Espinosa-Anke
Luis Espinosa-Anke
Senior Lecturer
Jose Camacho-Collados
Jose Camacho-Collados
Professor & UKRI Future Leaders Fellow