How often are errors in natural language reasoning due to paraphrastic variability?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Srikanth, Neha, Carpuat, Marine, Rudinger, Rachel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Srikanth, Neha
Carpuat, Marine
Rudinger, Rachel
author_facet Srikanth, Neha
Carpuat, Marine
Rudinger, Rachel
contents Large language models have been shown to behave inconsistently in response to meaning-preserving paraphrastic inputs. At the same time, researchers evaluate the knowledge and reasoning abilities of these models with test evaluations that do not disaggregate the effect of paraphrastic variability on performance. We propose a metric for evaluating the paraphrastic consistency of natural language reasoning models based on the probability of a model achieving the same correctness on two paraphrases of the same problem. We mathematically connect this metric to the proportion of a model's variance in correctness attributable to paraphrasing. To estimate paraphrastic consistency, we collect ParaNLU, a dataset of 7,782 human-written and validated paraphrased reasoning problems constructed on top of existing benchmark datasets for defeasible and abductive natural language inference. Using ParaNLU, we measure the paraphrastic consistency of several model classes and show that consistency dramatically increases with pretraining but not finetuning. All models tested exhibited room for improvement in paraphrastic consistency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_11717
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How often are errors in natural language reasoning due to paraphrastic variability?
Srikanth, Neha
Carpuat, Marine
Rudinger, Rachel
Computation and Language
Large language models have been shown to behave inconsistently in response to meaning-preserving paraphrastic inputs. At the same time, researchers evaluate the knowledge and reasoning abilities of these models with test evaluations that do not disaggregate the effect of paraphrastic variability on performance. We propose a metric for evaluating the paraphrastic consistency of natural language reasoning models based on the probability of a model achieving the same correctness on two paraphrases of the same problem. We mathematically connect this metric to the proportion of a model's variance in correctness attributable to paraphrasing. To estimate paraphrastic consistency, we collect ParaNLU, a dataset of 7,782 human-written and validated paraphrased reasoning problems constructed on top of existing benchmark datasets for defeasible and abductive natural language inference. Using ParaNLU, we measure the paraphrastic consistency of several model classes and show that consistency dramatically increases with pretraining but not finetuning. All models tested exhibited room for improvement in paraphrastic consistency.
title How often are errors in natural language reasoning due to paraphrastic variability?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11717