Comparative Evaluation of GPT, BERT, and XLNet: Insights into Their Performance and Applicability in NLP Tasks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a pivotal area in artificial intelligence, aiming to make computers capable of understanding and generating human language. This study evaluates and compares three prominent NLP models—the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, and Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding (XLNet)—to determine their strengths, limitations, and suitability for various tasks. The research involves a comprehensive analysis of these models, utilizing well-established datasets such as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE), Reading Comprehension from Examinations (RACE), and the Situations with Adversarial Generations (SWAG). The study explores each model's architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning processes: GPT’s unidirectional approach is assessed for its language generation and handling of long-range dependencies; Bidirectional encoding is examined for its effectiveness in context understanding, and XLNet permutation-based training is analyzed for its robust contextual comprehension. The experimental results reveal that GPT excels in generative tasks but is constrained by its unidirectional nature. BERT achieves superior accuracy in comprehension tasks but is computationally demanding and susceptible to pre-training bias. XLNet outperforms both GPT and BERT in accuracy and contextual understanding, though at the cost of increased complexity. The results offer a significant understanding of the effectiveness and applicability of these models, suggesting future research directions such as hybrid models and improvements in efficiency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".