Pre-training Language Models for Comparative Reasoning

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to pre-train language models for enhancing their abilities of comparative reasoning over texts. While recent research has developed models for NLP tasks that require comparative reasoning, they suffer from costly manual data labeling and limited generalizability to different tasks. Our approach involves a scalable method for collecting data for text-based entity comparison, which leverages both structured and unstructured data, and the design of three novel pre-training tasks. Evaluation on a range of downstream tasks including comparative question answering, question generation, and summarization shows that our pre-training framework significantly improves the comparative reasoning abilities of language models, especially under low-resource conditions. This work also releases the first integrated benchmark for comparative reasoning over texts.