@inproceedings{lin-etal-2021-rockner,
title = "{R}ock{NER}: A Simple Method to Create Adversarial Examples for Evaluating the Robustness of Named Entity Recognition Models",
author = "Lin, Bill Yuchen and
Gao, Wenyang and
Yan, Jun and
Moreno, Ryan and
Ren, Xiang",
editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine and
Huang, Xuanjing and
Specia, Lucia and
Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2021",
address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.302/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.302",
pages = "3728--3737",
abstract = "To audit the robustness of named entity recognition (NER) models, we propose RockNER, a simple yet effective method to create natural adversarial examples. Specifically, at the entity level, we replace target entities with other entities of the same semantic class in Wikidata; at the context level, we use pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) to generate word substitutions. Together, the two levels of at- tack produce natural adversarial examples that result in a shifted distribution from the training data on which our target models have been trained. We apply the proposed method to the OntoNotes dataset and create a new benchmark named OntoRock for evaluating the robustness of existing NER models via a systematic evaluation protocol. Our experiments and analysis reveal that even the best model has a significant performance drop, and these models seem to memorize in-domain entity patterns instead of reasoning from the context. Our work also studies the effects of a few simple data augmentation methods to improve the robustness of NER models."
}
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<abstract>To audit the robustness of named entity recognition (NER) models, we propose RockNER, a simple yet effective method to create natural adversarial examples. Specifically, at the entity level, we replace target entities with other entities of the same semantic class in Wikidata; at the context level, we use pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) to generate word substitutions. Together, the two levels of at- tack produce natural adversarial examples that result in a shifted distribution from the training data on which our target models have been trained. We apply the proposed method to the OntoNotes dataset and create a new benchmark named OntoRock for evaluating the robustness of existing NER models via a systematic evaluation protocol. Our experiments and analysis reveal that even the best model has a significant performance drop, and these models seem to memorize in-domain entity patterns instead of reasoning from the context. Our work also studies the effects of a few simple data augmentation methods to improve the robustness of NER models.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T RockNER: A Simple Method to Create Adversarial Examples for Evaluating the Robustness of Named Entity Recognition Models
%A Lin, Bill Yuchen
%A Gao, Wenyang
%A Yan, Jun
%A Moreno, Ryan
%A Ren, Xiang
%Y Moens, Marie-Francine
%Y Huang, Xuanjing
%Y Specia, Lucia
%Y Yih, Scott Wen-tau
%S Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2021
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
%F lin-etal-2021-rockner
%X To audit the robustness of named entity recognition (NER) models, we propose RockNER, a simple yet effective method to create natural adversarial examples. Specifically, at the entity level, we replace target entities with other entities of the same semantic class in Wikidata; at the context level, we use pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) to generate word substitutions. Together, the two levels of at- tack produce natural adversarial examples that result in a shifted distribution from the training data on which our target models have been trained. We apply the proposed method to the OntoNotes dataset and create a new benchmark named OntoRock for evaluating the robustness of existing NER models via a systematic evaluation protocol. Our experiments and analysis reveal that even the best model has a significant performance drop, and these models seem to memorize in-domain entity patterns instead of reasoning from the context. Our work also studies the effects of a few simple data augmentation methods to improve the robustness of NER models.
%R 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.302
%U https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.302/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.302
%P 3728-3737
Markdown (Informal)
[RockNER: A Simple Method to Create Adversarial Examples for Evaluating the Robustness of Named Entity Recognition Models](https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.302/) (Lin et al., EMNLP 2021)
ACL