Expanding Scope: Adapting English Adversarial Attacks to Chinese

Hanyu Liu, Chengyuan Cai, Yanjun Qi


Abstract
Recent studies have revealed that NLP predictive models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Most existing studies focused on designing attacks to evaluate the robustness of NLP models in the English language alone. Literature has seen an increasing need for NLP solutions for other languages. We, therefore, ask one natural question whether state-of-the-art (SOTA) attack methods generalize to other languages. This paper investigates how to adapt SOTA adversarial attack algorithms in English to the Chinese language. Our experiments show that attack methods previously applied to English NLP can generate high-quality adversarial examples in Chinese when combined with proper text segmentation and linguistic constraints. In addition, we demonstrate that the generated adversarial examples can achieve high fluency and sentiment consistency by focusing on the Chinese language’s morphology and phonology, which in turn can be used to improve the adversarial robustness of Chinese NLP models.
Anthology ID:
2023.trustnlp-1.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anaelia Ovalle, Kai-Wei Chang, Ninareh Mehrabi, Yada Pruksachatkun, Aram Galystan, Jwala Dhamala, Apurv Verma, Trista Cao, Anoop Kumar, Rahul Gupta
Venue:
TrustNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
276–286
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.trustnlp-1.24
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.trustnlp-1.24
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanyu Liu, Chengyuan Cai, and Yanjun Qi. 2023. Expanding Scope: Adapting English Adversarial Attacks to Chinese. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2023), pages 276–286, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Expanding Scope: Adapting English Adversarial Attacks to Chinese (Liu et al., TrustNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.trustnlp-1.24.pdf