SeqAttack: On Adversarial Attacks for Named Entity Recognition

Walter Simoncini, Gerasimos Spanakis


Abstract
Named Entity Recognition is a fundamental task in information extraction and is an essential element for various Natural Language Processing pipelines. Adversarial attacks have been shown to greatly affect the performance of text classification systems but knowledge about their effectiveness against named entity recognition models is limited. This paper investigates the effectiveness and portability of adversarial attacks from text classification to named entity recognition and the ability of adversarial training to counteract these attacks. We find that character-level and word-level attacks are the most effective, but adversarial training can grant significant protection at little to no expense of standard performance. Alongside our results, we also release SeqAttack, a framework to conduct adversarial attacks against token classification models (used in this work for named entity recognition) and a companion web application to inspect and cherry pick adversarial examples.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-demo.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Heike Adel, Shuming Shi
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
308–318
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Walter Simoncini and Gerasimos Spanakis. 2021. SeqAttack: On Adversarial Attacks for Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 308–318, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SeqAttack: On Adversarial Attacks for Named Entity Recognition (Simoncini & Spanakis, EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.35.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.35.mp4
Data
CoNLL 2003