Machine learning models have been providing promising results in many fields including natural language processing. These models are, nevertheless, prone to adversarial examples. These are artificially constructed examples which evince two main features: they resemble the real training data but they deceive already trained model. This paper investigates the effect of using adversarial examples during the training of recurrent neural networks whose text input is in the form of a sequence of word/character embeddings. The effects are studied on a compilation of eight NLP datasets whose interface was unified for quick experimenting. Based on the experiments and the dataset characteristics, we conclude that using the adversarial examples for NLP tasks that are modeled by recurrent neural networks provides a regularization effect and enables the training of models with greater number of parameters without overfitting. In addition, we discuss which combinations of datasets and model settings might benefit from the adversarial training the most.
@InProceedings{BĚLOHLÁVEK18.852, author = {Petr Bělohlávek and Ondřej Plátek and Zdeněk Žabokrtský and Milan Straka}, title = "{Using Adversarial Examples in Natural Language Processing}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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