The Impact of the Retrieval Text Set for Text Sentiment Classification With the Retrieval-Augmented Language Model REALM

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results across various language technology tasks. By training on large corpora of diverse text collections from the internet, these models learn to process text effectively, allowing them to acquire comprehensive world knowledge. However, this knowledge is stored implicitly in the parameters of the model, and it is necessary to train ever-larger networks to capture more information. Retrieval-augmented language models have been proposed as a way of improving the interpretability and adaptability of normal language models by utilizing a separate retrieval text set during application time. These models have demonstrated state-of-the-art results on knowledge-intensive tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking. However, their effectiveness in text classification remains unexplored. This study investigates the impact of the retrieval text set on the performance of the retrieval-augmented language model REALM model for sentiment text classification tasks. The results indicate that the addition of retrieval text data fails to improve the prediction capabilities of REALM for sentiment text classification tasks. This outcome is mainly due to the difference in functionality of the retrieval mechanisms during pre-training and fine-tuning. During pre-training, the neural knowledge retriever focuses on retrieving factual knowledge such as dates, cities and names to enhance the prediction of the model. During fine-tuning, the retriever aims to retrieve texts that can strengthen the prediction of the text sentiment classification task. The findings suggest that retrieval models may hold limited potential to enhance performance for text sentiment classification tasks.