The Solution of Huawei Cloud & Noah’s Ark Lab to the NLPCC-2020 Challenge: Light Pre-Training Chinese Language Model for NLP Task

Abstract

Pre-trained language models have achieved great success in natural language processing. However, they are difficult to be deployed on resource-restricted devices because of the expensive computation. This paper introduces our solution to the Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC) challenge of Light Pre-Training Chinese Language Model for the Natural Language Processing (http://tcci.ccf.org.cn/conference/2020/) (https://www.cluebenchmarks.com/NLPCC.html). The proposed solution uses a state-of-the-art method of BERT knowledge distillation (TinyBERT) with an advanced Chinese pre-trained language model (NEZHA) as the teacher model, which is dubbed as TinyNEZHA. In addition, we introduce some effective techniques in the fine-tuning stage to boost the performances of TinyNEZHA. In the official evaluation of NLPCC-2020 challenge, TinyNEZHA achieves a score of 77.71, ranking 1st place among all the participating teams. Compared with the BERT-base, TinyNEZHA obtains almost the same results while being 9× smaller and 8× faster on inference.