RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations
Yilun Zhao, Chen Zhao, Linyong Nan, Zhenting Qi, Wenlin Zhang, Xiangru Tang, Boyu Mi, Dragomir Radev
Abstract
Despite significant progress having been made in question answering on tabular data (Table QA), it’s unclear whether, and to what extent existing Table QA models are robust to task-specific perturbations, e.g., replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. To systematically study the robustness of Table QA models, we propose a benchmark called RobuT, which builds upon existing Table QA datasets (WTQ, WikiSQL-Weak, and SQA) and includes human-annotated adversarial perturbations in terms of table header, table content, and question. Our results indicate that both state-of-the-art Table QA models and large language models (e.g., GPT-3) with few-shot learning falter in these adversarial sets. We propose to address this problem by using large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2023-robut,
title = "{R}obu{T}: A Systematic Study of Table {QA} Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations",
author = "Zhao, Yilun and
Zhao, Chen and
Nan, Linyong and
Qi, Zhenting and
Zhang, Wenlin and
Tang, Xiangru and
Mi, Boyu and
Radev, Dragomir",
editor = "Rogers, Anna and
Boyd-Graber, Jordan and
Okazaki, Naoaki",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.334/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.334",
pages = "6064--6081"
}