@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2022-interpreting,
title = "Interpreting the Robustness of Neural {NLP} Models to Textual Perturbations",
author = "Zhang, Yunxiang and
Pan, Liangming and
Tan, Samson and
Kan, Min-Yen",
editor = "Muresan, Smaranda and
Nakov, Preslav and
Villavicencio, Aline",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022",
month = may,
year = "2022",
address = "Dublin, Ireland",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.315",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.315",
pages = "3993--4007",
abstract = "Modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are known to be sensitive to input perturbations and their performance can decrease when applied to real-world, noisy data. However, it is still unclear why models are less robust to some perturbations than others. In this work, we test the hypothesis that the extent to which a model is affected by an unseen textual perturbation (robustness) can be explained by the learnability of the perturbation (defined as how well the model learns to identify the perturbation with a small amount of evidence). We further give a causal justification for the learnability metric. We conduct extensive experiments with four prominent NLP models {---} TextRNN, BERT, RoBERTa and XLNet {---} over eight types of textual perturbations on three datasets. We show that a model which is better at identifying a perturbation (higher learnability) becomes worse at ignoring such a perturbation at test time (lower robustness), providing empirical support for our hypothesis.",
}
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<abstract>Modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are known to be sensitive to input perturbations and their performance can decrease when applied to real-world, noisy data. However, it is still unclear why models are less robust to some perturbations than others. In this work, we test the hypothesis that the extent to which a model is affected by an unseen textual perturbation (robustness) can be explained by the learnability of the perturbation (defined as how well the model learns to identify the perturbation with a small amount of evidence). We further give a causal justification for the learnability metric. We conduct extensive experiments with four prominent NLP models — TextRNN, BERT, RoBERTa and XLNet — over eight types of textual perturbations on three datasets. We show that a model which is better at identifying a perturbation (higher learnability) becomes worse at ignoring such a perturbation at test time (lower robustness), providing empirical support for our hypothesis.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Interpreting the Robustness of Neural NLP Models to Textual Perturbations
%A Zhang, Yunxiang
%A Pan, Liangming
%A Tan, Samson
%A Kan, Min-Yen
%Y Muresan, Smaranda
%Y Nakov, Preslav
%Y Villavicencio, Aline
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
%D 2022
%8 May
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Dublin, Ireland
%F zhang-etal-2022-interpreting
%X Modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are known to be sensitive to input perturbations and their performance can decrease when applied to real-world, noisy data. However, it is still unclear why models are less robust to some perturbations than others. In this work, we test the hypothesis that the extent to which a model is affected by an unseen textual perturbation (robustness) can be explained by the learnability of the perturbation (defined as how well the model learns to identify the perturbation with a small amount of evidence). We further give a causal justification for the learnability metric. We conduct extensive experiments with four prominent NLP models — TextRNN, BERT, RoBERTa and XLNet — over eight types of textual perturbations on three datasets. We show that a model which is better at identifying a perturbation (higher learnability) becomes worse at ignoring such a perturbation at test time (lower robustness), providing empirical support for our hypothesis.
%R 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.315
%U https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.315
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.315
%P 3993-4007
Markdown (Informal)
[Interpreting the Robustness of Neural NLP Models to Textual Perturbations](https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.315) (Zhang et al., Findings 2022)
ACL