Recent developments in Named Entity Recognition (NER) have resulted in better and better models. However, is there a glass ceiling? Do we know which types of errors are still hard or even impossible to correct? In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the types of errors in state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods. Our study illustrates weak and strong points of the Stanford, CMU, FLAIR, ELMO and BERT models, as well as their shared limitations. We also introduce new techniques for improving annotation, training process, and for checking model quality and stability.

This paper presents a simple but general and effective method to debug the output of machine learning (ML) supervised models, including neural networks. The algorithm looks for features that lower the evaluation metric in such a way that it cannot be ascribed to chance (as measured by their p-values). Using this method – implemented as MLEval tool – you can find: (1) anomalies in test sets, (2) issues in preprocessing, (3) problems in the ML model itself. It can give you an insight into what can be improved in the datasets and/or the model. The same method can be used to compare ML models or different versions of the same model. We present the tool, the theory behind it and use cases for text-based models of various types.

Datasets that boosted state-of-the-art solutions for Question Answering (QA) systems prove that it is possible to ask questions in natural language manner. However, users are still used to query-like systems where they type in keywords to search for answer. In this study we validate which parts of questions are essential for obtaining valid answer. In order to conclude that, we take advantage of LIME - a framework that explains prediction by local approximation. We find that grammar and natural language is disregarded by QA. State-of-the-art model can answer properly even if ’asked’ only with a few words with high coefficients calculated with LIME. According to our knowledge, it is the first time that QA model is being explained by LIME.

In this paper we present the results of an investigation of the importance of verbs in a deep learning QA system trained on SQuAD dataset. We show that main verbs in questions carry little influence on the decisions made by the system - in over 90% of researched cases swapping verbs for their antonyms did not change system decision. We track this phenomenon down to the insides of the net, analyzing the mechanism of self-attention and values contained in hidden layers of RNN. Finally, we recognize the characteristics of the SQuAD dataset as the source of the problem. Our work refers to the recently popular topic of adversarial examples in NLP, combined with investigating deep net structure.