Semantic Sensitivities and Inconsistent Predictions: Measuring the Fragility of NLI Models

Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapportKonferencebidrag i proceedingsForskningfagfællebedømt

Dokumenter

Recent studies of the emergent capabilities of transformer-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models have indicated that they have an understanding of lexical and compositional semantics. We provide evidence that suggests these claims should be taken with a grain of salt: we find that state-of-the-art Natural Language Inference (NLI) models are sensitive towards minor semantics preserving surface-form variations, which lead to sizable inconsistent model decisions during inference. Notably, this behaviour differs from valid and in-depth comprehension of compositional semantics, however does neither emerge when evaluating model accuracy on standard benchmarks nor when probing for syntactic, monotonic, and logically robust reasoning. We propose a novel framework to measure the extent of semantic sensitivity. To this end, we evaluate NLI models on adversarially generated examples containing minor semantics-preserving surface-form input noise. This is achieved using conditional text generation, with the explicit condition that the NLI model predicts the relationship between the original and adversarial inputs as a symmetric equivalence entailment. We systematically study the effects of the phenomenon across NLI models for in- and out-of domain settings. Our experiments show that semantic sensitivity causes performance degradations of 12.92% and 23.71% average over in- and out-of- domain settings, respectively. We further perform ablation studies, analysing this phenomenon across models, datasets, and variations in inference and show that semantic sensitivity can lead to major inconsistency within model predictions.

OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelEACL 2024 - 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
RedaktørerYvette Graham, Matthew Purver, Matthew Purver
Antal sider13
ForlagAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publikationsdato2024
Sider432-444
ISBN (Elektronisk)9798891760882
StatusUdgivet - 2024
Begivenhed18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2024 - St. Julian's, Malta
Varighed: 17 mar. 202422 mar. 2024

Konference

Konference18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2024
LandMalta
BySt. Julian's
Periode17/03/202422/03/2024
SponsorAdobe, Babelscape, Bloomberg Engineering, Megagon Labs, Snowflake

Bibliografisk note

Funding Information:
Erik is partially funded by a DFF Sapere Aude research leader grant under grant agreement No 0171-00034B, as well as by a NEC PhD fellowship. This work is further supported by the Pioneer Centre for AI, DNRF grant number P1.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Links

ID: 392216116