It's 'Morphin' Time! Combating Linguistic Discrimination with Inflectional Perturbations

Abstract

Training on only perfect Standard English cor- pora predisposes pre-trained neural networks to discriminate against minorities from non- standard linguistic backgrounds. We perturb the inflectional morphology of words to craft plausible and semantically similar adversarial examples that expose these biases in popu- lar models, e.g., BERT and Transformer, and show that adversarially finetuning them for a single epoch significantly improves robustness without sacrificing performance on clean data.

Publication
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Date
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