Pre-Trained Language Models and Their Applications

Pre-trained language models have achieved striking success in natural language processing (NLP), leading to a paradigm shift from supervised learning to pre-training followed by fine-tuning. The NLP community has witnessed a surge of research interest in improving pre-trained models. This article presents a com-prehensive review of representative work and recent progress in the NLP field and introduces the taxon-omy of pre-trained models. We first give a brief introduction of pre-trained models, followed by characteristic methods and frameworks. We then introduce and analyze the impact and challenges of pre-trained models and their downstream applications. Finally, we briefly conclude and address future research directions in this field.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier LTD on behalf of Chinese Academy of Engineering and Higher Education Press Limited Company. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).