Smash at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Optimizing the Hyperparameters of ERNIE 2.0 for Humor Ranking and Rating

Abstract

The use of pre-trained language models such as BERT and ULMFiT has become increasingly popular in shared tasks, due to their powerful language modelling capabilities. Our entry to SemEval uses ERNIE 2.0, a language model which is pre-trained on a large number of tasks to enrich the semantic and syntactic information learned. ERNIE's knowledge masking pre-training task is a unique method for learning about named entities, and we hypothesise that it may be of use in a dataset which is built on news headlines and which contains many named entities. We optimize the hyperparameters in a regression and classification model and find that the hyperparameters we selected helped to make bigger gains in the classification model than the regression model.