Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets

Guanhua Zhang, Bing Bai, Jian Liang, Kun Bai, Shiyu Chang, Mo Yu, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao


Abstract
Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) has gained substantial attention from both academics and the industry, and rich public datasets contribute a lot to this process. However, biased datasets can also hurt the generalization performance of trained models and give untrustworthy evaluation results. For many NLSM datasets, the providers select some pairs of sentences into the datasets, and this sampling procedure can easily bring unintended pattern, i.e., selection bias. One example is the QuoraQP dataset, where some content-independent naive features are unreasonably predictive. Such features are the reflection of the selection bias and termed as the “leakage features.” In this paper, we investigate the problem of selection bias on six NLSM datasets and find that four out of them are significantly biased. We further propose a training and evaluation framework to alleviate the bias. Experimental results on QuoraQP suggest that the proposed framework can improve the generalization ability of trained models, and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions.
Anthology ID:
P19-1435
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4418–4429
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1435
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1435
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guanhua Zhang, Bing Bai, Jian Liang, Kun Bai, Shiyu Chang, Mo Yu, Conghui Zhu, and Tiejun Zhao. 2019. Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4418–4429, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets (Zhang et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1435.pdf
Supplementary:
 P19-1435.Supplementary.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1435.mp4
Code
 arthua196/Leakage-Neutral-Learning-for-QuoraQP +  additional community code
Data
MultiNLISICKSNLI