Towards the Necessity for Debiasing Natural Language Inference Datasets

Mithun Paul Panenghat, Sandeep Suntwal, Faiz Rafique, Rebecca Sharp, Mihai Surdeanu


Abstract
Modeling natural language inference is a challenging task. With large annotated data sets available it has now become feasible to train complex neural network based inference methods which achieve state of the art performance. However, it has been shown that these models also learn from the subtle biases inherent in these datasets (CITATION). In this work we explore two techniques for delexicalization that modify the datasets in such a way that we can control the importance that neural-network based methods place on lexical entities. We demonstrate that the proposed methods not only maintain the performance in-domain but also improve performance in some out-of-domain settings. For example, when using the delexicalized version of the FEVER dataset, the in-domain performance of a state of the art neural network method dropped only by 1.12% while its out-of-domain performance on the FNC dataset improved by 4.63%. We release the delexicalized versions of three common datasets used in natural language inference. These datasets are delexicalized using two methods: one which replaces the lexical entities in an overlap-aware manner, and a second, which additionally incorporates semantic lifting of nouns and verbs to their WordNet hypernym synsets
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.850
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6883–6888
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.850
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mithun Paul Panenghat, Sandeep Suntwal, Faiz Rafique, Rebecca Sharp, and Mihai Surdeanu. 2020. Towards the Necessity for Debiasing Natural Language Inference Datasets. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6883–6888, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Towards the Necessity for Debiasing Natural Language Inference Datasets (Paul Panenghat et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.850.pdf