Document Structure in Long Document Transformers

Jan Buchmann, Max Eichler, Jan-Micha Bodensohn, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
Long documents often exhibit structure with hierarchically organized elements of different functions, such as section headers and paragraphs. Despite the omnipresence of document structure, its role in natural language processing (NLP) remains opaque. Do long-document Transformer models acquire an internal representation of document structure during pre-training? How can structural information be communicated to a model after pre-training, and how does it influence downstream performance? To answer these questions, we develop a novel suite of probing tasks to assess structure-awareness of long-document Transformers, propose general-purpose structure infusion methods, and evaluate the effects of structure infusion on QASPER and Evidence Inference, two challenging long-document NLP tasks. Results on LED and LongT5 suggest that they acquire implicit understanding of document structure during pre-training, which can be further enhanced by structure infusion, leading to improved end-task performance. To foster research on the role of document structure in NLP modeling, we make our data and code publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1056–1073
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.64
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jan Buchmann, Max Eichler, Jan-Micha Bodensohn, Ilia Kuznetsov, and Iryna Gurevych. 2024. Document Structure in Long Document Transformers. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1056–1073, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Document Structure in Long Document Transformers (Buchmann et al., EACL 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.64.pdf
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