{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/inexpensive-domain-adaptation-of-pretrained","title":"Inexpensive Domain Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models: Case Studies on Biomedical NER and Covid-19 QA","arxiv_id":"2004.03354","date":"2020-04-07","proceeding":"Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020","authors":["Nina Poerner","Ulli Waltinger","Hinrich Schütze"],"abstract":"Domain adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (PTLMs) is typically achieved by unsupervised pretraining on target-domain text. While successful, this approach is expensive in terms of hardware, runtime and CO_2 emissions. Here, we propose a cheaper alternative: We train Word2Vec on target-domain text and align the resulting word vectors with the wordpiece vectors of a general-domain PTLM. We evaluate on eight biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks and compare against the recently proposed BioBERT model. We cover over 60% of the BioBERT-BERT F1 delta, at 5% of BioBERT's CO_2 footprint and 2% of its cloud compute cost. We also show how to quickly adapt an existing general-domain Question Answering (QA) model to an emerging domain: the Covid-19 pandemic.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03354v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.03354v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"inexpensive-domain-adaptation-of-pretrained","repo_url":"https://github.com/npoe/covid-qa","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"domain-adaptation","task_name":"Domain Adaptation"},{"task_slug":"cg","task_name":"NER"},{"task_slug":"named-entity-recognition-1","task_name":"Named Entity Recognition"},{"task_slug":"named-entity-recognition-ner","task_name":"Named Entity Recognition (NER)"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"named-entity-recognition","task_name":"named-entity-recognition"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2004.03354","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}