Marco Negrini


2022

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Attack on Unfair ToS Clause Detection: A Case Study using Universal Adversarial Triggers
Shanshan Xu | Irina Broda | Rashid Haddad | Marco Negrini | Matthias Grabmair
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022

Recent work has demonstrated that natural language processing techniques can support consumer protection by automatically detecting unfair clauses in the Terms of Service (ToS) Agreement. This work demonstrates that transformer-based ToS analysis systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We conduct experiments attacking an unfair-clause detector with universal adversarial triggers. Experiments show that a minor perturbation of the text can considerably reduce the detection performance. Moreover, to measure the detectability of the triggers, we conduct a detailed human evaluation study by collecting both answer accuracy and response time from the participants. The results show that the naturalness of the triggers remains key to tricking readers.