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Main Authors: Siro, Clemencia, Ajayi, Tunde Oluwaseyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03145
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author Siro, Clemencia
Ajayi, Tunde Oluwaseyi
author_facet Siro, Clemencia
Ajayi, Tunde Oluwaseyi
contents Question answering (QA) models have shown compelling results in the task of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). Recently these systems have proved to perform better than humans on held-out test sets of datasets e.g. SQuAD, but their robustness is not guaranteed. The QA model's brittleness is exposed when evaluated on adversarial generated examples by a performance drop. In this study, we explore the robustness of MRC models to entity renaming, with entities from low-resource regions such as Africa. We propose EntSwap, a method for test-time perturbations, to create a test set whose entities have been renamed. In particular, we rename entities of type: country, person, nationality, location, organization, and city, to create AfriSQuAD2. Using the perturbed test set, we evaluate the robustness of three popular MRC models. We find that compared to base models, large models perform well comparatively on novel entities. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that entity type person highly challenges the MRC models' performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_03145
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating the Robustness of Machine Reading Comprehension Models to Low Resource Entity Renaming
Siro, Clemencia
Ajayi, Tunde Oluwaseyi
Computation and Language
Question answering (QA) models have shown compelling results in the task of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). Recently these systems have proved to perform better than humans on held-out test sets of datasets e.g. SQuAD, but their robustness is not guaranteed. The QA model's brittleness is exposed when evaluated on adversarial generated examples by a performance drop. In this study, we explore the robustness of MRC models to entity renaming, with entities from low-resource regions such as Africa. We propose EntSwap, a method for test-time perturbations, to create a test set whose entities have been renamed. In particular, we rename entities of type: country, person, nationality, location, organization, and city, to create AfriSQuAD2. Using the perturbed test set, we evaluate the robustness of three popular MRC models. We find that compared to base models, large models perform well comparatively on novel entities. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that entity type person highly challenges the MRC models' performance.
title Evaluating the Robustness of Machine Reading Comprehension Models to Low Resource Entity Renaming
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03145