Jeanna Matthews

Norah Alshahrani, Saied Alshahrani, Esma Wali et al.

Text classification systems have been proven vulnerable to adversarial text examples, modified versions of the original text examples that are often unnoticed by human eyes, yet can force text classification models to alter their classification. Often, research works quantifying the impact of adversarial text attacks have been applied only to models trained in English. In this paper, we introduce the first word-level study of adversarial attacks in Arabic. Specifically, we use a synonym (word-level) attack using a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task with a BERT model in a black-box setting to assess the robustness of the state-of-the-art text classification models to adversarial attacks in Arabic. To evaluate the grammatical and semantic similarities of the newly produced adversarial examples using our synonym BERT-based attack, we invite four human evaluators to assess and compare the produced adversarial examples with their original examples. We also study the transferability of these newly produced Arabic adversarial examples to various models and investigate the effectiveness of defense mechanisms against these adversarial examples on the BERT models. We find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to our synonym attacks than the other Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models like WordCNN and WordLSTM we trained. We also find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to transferred attacks. We, lastly, find that fine-tuned BERT models successfully regain at least 2% in accuracy after applying adversarial training as an initial defense mechanism.

Saied Alshahrani, Hesham Haroon, Ali Elfilali et al.

Wikipedia articles (content pages) are commonly used corpora in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially in low-resource languages other than English. Yet, a few research studies have studied the three Arabic Wikipedia editions, Arabic Wikipedia (AR), Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia (ARZ), and Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia (ARY), and documented issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia edition regarding the massive automatic creation of its articles using template-based translation from English to Arabic without human involvement, overwhelming the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with articles that do not only have low-quality content but also with articles that do not represent the Egyptian people, their culture, and their dialect. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the problem of template translation that occurred in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia by identifying these template-translated articles and their characteristics through exploratory analysis and building automatic detection systems. We first explore the content of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions in terms of density, quality, and human contributions and utilize the resulting insights to build multivariate machine learning classifiers leveraging articles' metadata to detect the template-translated articles automatically. We then publicly deploy and host the best-performing classifier, XGBoost, as an online application called EGYPTIAN WIKIPEDIA SCANNER and release the extracted, filtered, and labeled datasets to the research community to benefit from our datasets and the online, web-based detection system.

Esma Wali, Yan Chen, Christopher Mahoney et al.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly used as a key ingredient in critical decision-making systems such as resume parsers used in sorting a list of job candidates. NLP systems often ingest large corpora of human text, attempting to learn from past human behavior and decisions in order to produce systems that will make recommendations about our future world. Over 7000 human languages are being spoken today and the typical NLP pipeline underrepresents speakers of most of them while amplifying the voices of speakers of other languages. In this paper, a team including speakers of 8 languages - English, Chinese, Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Wolof - takes a critical look at the typical NLP pipeline and how even when a language is technically supported, substantial caveats remain to prevent full participation. Despite huge and admirable investments in multilingual support in many tools and resources, we are still making NLP-guided decisions that systematically and dramatically underrepresent the voices of much of the world.