Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering

Orion Weller, Aleem Khan, Nathaniel Weir, Dawn Lawrie, Benjamin Van Durme


Abstract
Recent work in open-domain question answering (ODQA) has shown that adversarial poisoning of the search collection can cause large drops in accuracy for production systems. However, little to no work has proposed methods to defend against these attacks. To do so, we rely on the intuition that redundant information often exists in large corpora. To find it, we introduce a method that uses query augmentation to search for a diverse set of passages that could answer the original question but are less likely to have been poisoned. We integrate these new passages into the model through the design of a novel confidence method, comparing the predicted answer to its appearance in the retrieved contexts (what we call Confidence from Answer Redundancy, i.e. CAR). Together these methods allow for a simple but effective way to defend against poisoning attacks that provides gains of nearly 20% exact match across varying levels of data poisoning/knowledge conflicts.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-short.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
402–417
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-short.35
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Orion Weller, Aleem Khan, Nathaniel Weir, Dawn Lawrie, and Benjamin Van Durme. 2024. Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 402–417, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering (Weller et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-short.35.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-short.35.mp4