Self-training in natural language understanding (NLU) research has led to a set of recommendations for improving NLU performance. This paper provides an overview of the research, and suggests ways that pre-training on a specific task will improve performance on other tasks.
One of the first experiments in this project was to train pre-trained language models using only the context of a sentence, and a second experiment was to train on syntactic regularity. The first experiment was the most impressive of the three because it actually outperformed the second.
My first thought when I read that was “So now I understand why your sentences are so long.” I’ve been talking with a few people about how the way we write has become so complex that some of the best writers feel they have to use “long sentences”. I always find this a bit depressing, because I know that writing takes a lot of practice to get better at it.
The second experiment showed that the same technique used to improve on your ability to recognize syntactic regularity actually improved on your understanding of natural language.
The idea is that writing can benefit from self-training. If you can write in a way that gets rid of awkward pauses and unnecessary words and uses fewer grammatical errors, then your writing will be easier to read. So if you’re not able to write in a natural way, then you need to learn to write like you will be talking to others. As with any sort of program, you can do this by practicing a few times a day.
I don’t know about you, but I like the idea of writing like I will be talking to others.
However, self-training can take up a lot of time. So if youre already pretty good at writing, then you can use it to improve your natural writing. This is because the more you make your writing more like you will be talking to others, the more natural sounding it will be, especially when you have to write for the first time. In other words, you will be more likely to write sentences with clear structure and fewer grammatical errors.
For more information on how to self-train, check out this article I wrote last year, which outlines the different steps that you can take to improve your natural writing. I think this article is still relevant, but I think you should definitely re-read it if you haven’t already.
The key here is the ability to make sense of your own experience. When you take the time to write it down, you’ll be more likely to actually understand it.
Speaking of writing, I have to say that it does come naturally to me. Not sure how much of this is the result of a high-powered computer or having access to good internet, but I know that I can’t write anything but the most grammatically-sound sentences without writing a whole lot of them.