PECO: Examining Single Sentence Label Leakage in Natural Language Inference Datasets through Progressive Evaluation of Cluster Outliers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the persistent issue of single sentence label leakage in NLI datasets, introduces a novel method called PECO to measure and detect this bias, and highlights its ongoing presence despite previous efforts to mitigate it.

Contribution

The paper presents PECO, a new model-driven technique for quantifying and identifying label leakage in NLI datasets, aiding future bias reduction efforts.

Findings

Leakage persists in recent datasets despite mitigation attempts.

PECO effectively measures and detects label leakage.

Subpopulations with high leakage are identified by PECO.

Abstract

Building natural language inference (NLI) benchmarks that are both challenging for modern techniques, and free from shortcut biases is difficult. Chief among these biases is "single sentence label leakage," where annotator-introduced spurious correlations yield datasets where the logical relation between (premise, hypothesis) pairs can be accurately predicted from only a single sentence, something that should in principle be impossible. We demonstrate that despite efforts to reduce this leakage, it persists in modern datasets that have been introduced since its 2018 discovery. To enable future amelioration efforts, introduce a novel model-driven technique, the progressive evaluation of cluster outliers (PECO) which enables both the objective measurement of leakage, and the automated detection of subpopulations in the data which maximally exhibit it.