PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling

Yuan Zhang, Jason Baldridge, Luheng He


Abstract
Existing paraphrase identification datasets lack sentence pairs that have high lexical overlap without being paraphrases. Models trained on such data fail to distinguish pairs like flights from New York to Florida and flights from Florida to New York. This paper introduces PAWS (Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling), a new dataset with 108,463 well-formed paraphrase and non-paraphrase pairs with high lexical overlap. Challenging pairs are generated by controlled word swapping and back translation, followed by fluency and paraphrase judgments by human raters. State-of-the-art models trained on existing datasets have dismal performance on PAWS (<40% accuracy); however, including PAWS training data for these models improves their accuracy to 85% while maintaining performance on existing tasks. In contrast, models that do not capture non-local contextual information fail even with PAWS training examples. As such, PAWS provides an effective instrument for driving further progress on models that better exploit structure, context, and pairwise comparisons.
Anthology ID:
N19-1131
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1298–1308
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1131
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1131
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuan Zhang, Jason Baldridge, and Luheng He. 2019. PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1298–1308, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling (Zhang et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/N19-1131.pdf
Code
 additional community code
Data
PAWS