GraSAME: Injecting Token-Level Structural Information to Pretrained Language Models via Graph-guided Self-Attention Mechanism

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) benefit from external knowledge stored in graph structures for various downstream tasks. However, bridging the modality gap between graph structures and text remains a significant challenge. Traditional methods like linearizing graphs for PLMs lose vital graph connectivity, whereas Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) require cumbersome processes for integration into PLMs. In this work, we propose a novel graph-guided self-attention mechanism, GraSAME. GraSAME seamlessly incorporates token-level structural information into PLMs without necessitating additional alignment or concatenation efforts. As an end-to-end, lightweight multimodal module, GraSAME follows a multi-task learning strategy and effectively bridges the gap between graph and textual modalities, facilitating dynamic interactions between GNNs and PLMs. Our experiments on the graph-to-text generation task demonstrate that GraSAME outperforms baseline models and achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on WebNLG datasets. Furthermore, compared to SOTA models, GraSAME eliminates the need for extra pre-training tasks to adjust graph inputs and reduces the number of trainable parameters by over 100 million.