Language models (LMs) are sentence-completion engines trained on massive corpora. LMs have emerged as a significant breakthrough in natural-language processing, providing capabilities that go far beyond sentence completion including question answering, summarization, and natural-language inference. While many of these capabilities have potential application to cognitive systems, exploiting language models as a source of task knowledge, especially for task learning, offers significant, near-term benefits. We introduce language models and the various tasks to which they have been applied and then review methods of knowledge extraction from language models. The resulting analysis outlines both the challenges and opportunities for using language models as a new knowledge source for cognitive systems. It also identifies possible ways to improve knowledge extraction from language models using the capabilities provided by cognitive systems. Central to success will be the ability of a cognitive agent to itself learn an abstract model of the knowledge implicit in the LM as well as methods to extract high-quality knowledge effectively and efficiently. To illustrate, we introduce a hypothetical robot agent and describe how language models could extend its task knowledge and improve its performance and the kinds of knowledge and methods the agent can use to exploit the knowledge within a language model.

中文翻译：

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语言模型作为认知代理的知识源

语言模型 (LM) 是在大量语料库上训练的句子完成引擎。LM 已成为自然语言处理领域的重大突破，提供的功能远远超出了句子补全，包括问答、摘要和自然语言推理。虽然其中许多功能有可能应用于认知系统，但利用语言模型作为任务知识的来源，尤其是对于任务学习，可提供显着的近期收益。我们介绍语言模型及其应用的各种任务，然后回顾从语言模型中提取知识的方法。由此产生的分析概述了使用语言模型作为认知系统新知识源的挑战和机遇。它还确定了使用认知系统提供的功能改进从语言模型中提取知识的可能方法。成功的核心将是认知代理自身学习 LM 中隐含知识的抽象模型的能力，以及有效和高效地提取高质量知识的方法。为了说明这一点，我们介绍了一个假设的机器人代理，并描述了语言模型如何扩展其任务知识并提高其性能以及代理可以用来利用语言模型中的知识的知识和方法的种类。成功的核心将是认知代理自身学习 LM 中隐含知识的抽象模型的能力，以及有效和高效地提取高质量知识的方法。为了说明这一点，我们介绍了一个假设的机器人代理，并描述了语言模型如何扩展其任务知识并提高其性能以及代理可以用来利用语言模型中的知识的知识和方法的种类。成功的核心将是认知代理自身学习 LM 中隐含知识的抽象模型的能力，以及有效和高效地提取高质量知识的方法。为了说明这一点，我们介绍了一个假设的机器人代理，并描述了语言模型如何扩展其任务知识并提高其性能以及代理可以用来利用语言模型中的知识的知识和方法的种类。