The Importance of Distracting Sentences in Model Evaluation

In this episode, Robin Jia talks about how to build robust NLP systems. We discuss the different senses in which a system can be robust, reasons to care about system robustness, and the challenges involved in evaluating robustness of NLP models. We talk about how to build certifiably robust models through interval bound propagation and discrete encoding functions, as well as how to modify data collection procedures through active learning for more robust model development. Robin Jia is currently a visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research, and will be an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California starting Fall 2021.