No Arabic abstract
Recent studies have revealed a security threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, called the Backdoor Attack. Victim models can maintain competitive performance on clean samples while behaving abnormally on samples with a specific trigger word inserted. Previous backdoor attacking methods usually assume that attackers have a certain degree of data knowledge, either the dataset which users would use or proxy datasets for a similar task, for implementing the data poisoning procedure. However, in this paper, we find that it is possible to hack the model in a data-free way by modifying one single word embedding vector, with almost no accuracy sacrificed on clean samples. Experimental results on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks show that our method is more efficient and stealthier. We hope this work can raise the awareness of such a critical security risk hidden in the embedding layers of NLP models. Our code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/Embedding-Poisoning.
In this paper, we introduce personalized word embeddings, and examine their value for language modeling. We compare the performance of our proposed prediction model when using personalized versus generic word representations, and study how these representations can be leveraged for improved performance. We provide insight into what types of words can be more accurately predicted when building personalized models. Our results show that a subset of words belonging to specific psycholinguistic categories tend to vary more in their representations across users and that combining generic and personalized word embeddings yields the best performance, with a 4.7% relative reduction in perplexity. Additionally, we show that a language model using personalized word embeddings can be effectively used for authorship attribution.
We introduce a set of nine challenge tasks that test for the understanding of function words. These tasks are created by structurally mutating sentences from existing datasets to target the comprehension of specific types of function words (e.g., prepositions, wh-words). Using these probing tasks, we explore the effects of various pretraining objectives for sentence encoders (e.g., language modeling, CCG supertagging and natural language inference (NLI)) on the learned representations. Our results show that pretraining on language modeling performs the best on average across our probing tasks, supporting its widespread use for pretraining state-of-the-art NLP models, and CCG supertagging and NLI pretraining perform comparably. Overall, no pretraining objective dominates across the board, and our function word probing tasks highlight several intuitive differences between pretraining objectives, e.g., that NLI helps the comprehension of negation.
Cross-lingual representations of words enable us to reason about word meaning in multilingual contexts and are a key facilitator of cross-lingual transfer when developing natural language processing models for low-resource languages. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive typology of cross-lingual word embedding models. We compare their data requirements and objective functions. The recurring theme of the survey is that many of the models presented in the literature optimize for the same objectives, and that seemingly different models are often equivalent modulo optimization strategies, hyper-parameters, and such. We also discuss the different ways cross-lingual word embeddings are evaluated, as well as future challenges and research horizons.
Despite interest in using cross-lingual knowledge to learn word embeddings for various tasks, a systematic comparison of the possible approaches is lacking in the literature. We perform an extensive evaluation of four popular approaches of inducing cross-lingual embeddings, each requiring a different form of supervision, on four typographically different language pairs. Our evaluation setup spans four different tasks, including intrinsic evaluation on mono-lingual and cross-lingual similarity, and extrinsic evaluation on downstream semantic and syntactic applications. We show that models which require expensive cross-lingual knowledge almost always perform better, but cheaply supervised models often prove competitive on certain tasks.
Social biases are encoded in word embeddings. This presents a unique opportunity to study society historically and at scale, and a unique danger when embeddings are used in downstream applications. Here, we investigate the extent to which publicly-available word embeddings accurately reflect beliefs about certain kinds of people as measured via traditional survey methods. We find that biases found in word embeddings do, on average, closely mirror survey data across seventeen dimensions of social meaning. However, we also find that biases in embeddings are much more reflective of survey data for some dimensions of meaning (e.g. gender) than others (e.g. race), and that we can be highly confident that embedding-based measures reflect survey data only for the most salient biases.