To ensure reliable performance of Question Answering (QA) systems, evaluation of robustness is crucial. Common evaluation benchmarks commonly only include performance metrics, such as Exact Match (EM) and the F1 score. However, these benchmarks overlook critical factors for the deployment of QA systems. This oversight can result in systems vulnerable to minor perturbations in the input such as typographical errors. While several methods have been proposed to test the robustness of QA models, there has been minimal exploration of these approaches for languages other than English. This study focuses on the robustness evaluation of German language QA models, extending methodologies previously applied primarily to English. The objective is to nurture the development of robust models by defining an evaluation method specifically tailored to the German language. We assess the applicability of perturbations used in English QA models for German and perform a comprehensive experimental evaluation with eight models. The results show that all models are vulnerable to character-level perturbations. Additionally, the comparison of monolingual and multilingual models suggest that the former are less affected by character and word-level perturbations.

Key Information Extraction (KIE) from visually rich documents is commonly approached as either fine-grained token classification or coarse-grained entity extraction. While token-level models capture spatial and visual cues, entity-level models better represent logical dependencies and align with real-world use cases.We introduce PM3-KIE, a probabilistic multi-task meta-model that incorporates both fine-grained and coarse-grained models. It serves as a lightweight reasoning layer that jointly predicts entities and all appearances in a document. PM3-KIE incorporates domain-specific schema constraints to enforce logical consistency and integrates large language models for semantic validation, thereby reducing extraction errors.Experiments on two public datasets, DeepForm and FARA, show that PM3-KIE outperforms three state-of-the-art models and a stacked ensemble, achieving a statistically significant 2% improvement in F1 score.

Within the context of Natural Language Processing (NLP), fairness evaluation is often associated with the assessment of bias and reduction of associated harm. In this regard, the evaluation is usually carried out by using a benchmark dataset, for a task such as Question Answering, created for the measurement of bias in the model’s predictions along various dimensions, including gender identity. In our work, we evaluate gender bias in German Large Language Models (LLMs) using the Bias Benchmark for Question Answering by Parrish et al. (2022) as a reference. Specifically, the templates in the gender identity subset of this English dataset were machine translated into German. The errors in the machine translated templates were then manually reviewed and corrected with the help of a language expert. We find that manual revision of the translation is crucial when creating datasets for gender bias evaluation because of the limitations of machine translation from English to a language such as German with grammatical gender. Our final dataset is comprised of two subsets: Subset-I, which consists of group terms related to gender identity, and Subset-II, where group terms are replaced with proper names. We evaluate several LLMs used for German NLP on this newly created dataset and report the accuracy and bias scores. The results show that all models exhibit bias, both along and against existing social stereotypes.

During the last years, there has been a lot of interest in achieving some kind of complex reasoning using deep neural networks. To do that, models like Memory Networks (MemNNs) have combined external memory storages and attention mechanisms. These architectures, however, lack of more complex reasoning mechanisms that could allow, for instance, relational reasoning. Relation Networks (RNs), on the other hand, have shown outstanding results in relational reasoning tasks. Unfortunately, their computational cost grows quadratically with the number of memories, something prohibitive for larger problems. To solve these issues, we introduce the Working Memory Network, a MemNN architecture with a novel working memory storage and reasoning module. Our model retains the relational reasoning abilities of the RN while reducing its computational complexity from quadratic to linear. We tested our model on the text QA dataset bAbI and the visual QA dataset NLVR. In the jointly trained bAbI-10k, we set a new state-of-the-art, achieving a mean error of less than 0.5%. Moreover, a simple ensemble of two of our models solves all 20 tasks in the joint version of the benchmark.

During the last years, there has been a lot of interest in achieving some kind of complex reasoning using deep neural networks. To do that, models like Memory Networks (MemNNs) have combined external memory storages and attention mechanisms. These architectures, however, lack of more complex reasoning mechanisms that could allow, for instance, relational reasoning. Relation Networks (RNs), on the other hand, have shown outstanding results in relational reasoning tasks. Unfortunately, their computational cost grows quadratically with the number of memories, something prohibitive for larger problems. To solve these issues, we introduce the Working Memory Network, a MemNN architecture with a novel working memory storage and reasoning module. Our model retains the relational reasoning abilities of the RN while reducing its computational complexity from quadratic to linear. We tested our model on the text QA dataset bAbI and the visual QA dataset NLVR. In the jointly trained bAbI-10k, we set a new state-of-the-art, achieving a mean error of less than 0.5%. Moreover, a simple ensemble of two of our models solves all 20 tasks in the joint version of the benchmark.