The widespread use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) has greatly improved performance outcomes. However, these models’ vulnerability to adversarial attacks (e.g., camouflaged hints from drug dealers), particularly in the Chinese language with its rich character diversity/variation and complex structures, hatches vital apprehension. In this study, we propose a novel method, CHinese vAriatioN Graph Enhancement (CHANGE), to increase the robustness of PLMs against character variation attacks in Chinese content. CHANGE presents a novel approach to incorporate a Chinese character variation graph into the PLMs. Through designing different supplementary tasks utilizing the graph structure, CHANGE essentially enhances PLMs’ interpretation of adversarially manipulated text. Experiments conducted in a multitude of NLP tasks show that CHANGE outperforms current language models in combating against adversarial attacks and serves as a valuable contribution to robust language model research. Moreover, these findings highlight the substantial potential of graph-guided pre-training strategies for real-world applications.

Recognizing metaphors and identifying the source-target mappings is an important task as metaphorical text poses a big challenge for machine reading. To address this problem, we automatically acquire a metaphor knowledge base and an isA knowledge base from billions of web pages. Using the knowledge bases, we develop an inference mechanism to recognize and explain the metaphors in the text. To our knowledge, this is the first purely data-driven approach of probabilistic metaphor acquisition, recognition, and explanation. Our results shows that it significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in recognizing and explaining metaphors.