@inproceedings{broscheit-etal-2022-distributionally,
    title = "Distributionally Robust Finetuning {BERT} for Covariate Drift in Spoken Language Understanding",
    author = "Broscheit, Samuel  and
      Do, Quynh  and
      Gaspers, Judith",
    editor = "Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2022.acl-long.139/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.139",
    pages = "1970--1985",
    abstract = "In this study, we investigate robustness against covariate drift in spoken language understanding (SLU). Covariate drift can occur in SLUwhen there is a drift between training and testing regarding what users request or how they request it. To study this we propose a method that exploits natural variations in data to create a covariate drift in SLU datasets. Experiments show that a state-of-the-art BERT-based model suffers performance loss under this drift. To mitigate the performance loss, we investigate distributionally robust optimization (DRO) for finetuning BERT-based models. We discuss some recent DRO methods, propose two new variants and empirically show that DRO improves robustness under drift."
}