Efficient Pre-training of Masked Language Model via Concept-based Curriculum Masking

Self-supervised pre-training has achieved remarkable success in extensive natural language processing tasks. Masked language modeling (MLM) has been widely used for pre-training effective bidirectional representations but comes at a substantial training cost. In this paper, we propose a novel concept-based curriculum masking (CCM) method to efficiently pre-train a language model. CCM has two key differences from existing curriculum learning approaches to effectively reflect the nature of MLM. First, we introduce a novel curriculum that evaluates the MLM difficulty of each token based on a carefully-designed linguistic difficulty criterion. Second, we construct a curriculum that masks easy words and phrases first and gradually masks related ones to the previously masked ones based on a knowledge graph. Experimental results show that CCM significantly improves pre-training efficiency. Specifically, the model trained with CCM shows comparative performance with the original BERT on the General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark at half of the training cost.