When Informal Text Breaks NLI: Tokenization Failure, Distribution Shift, and Targeted Mitigations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how informal language forms like slang and emojis impact NLI model accuracy, identifying tokenization failures as key issues and proposing targeted preprocessing and training strategies for mitigation.

Contribution

It reveals distinct failure modes caused by informal text in NLI and demonstrates effective hybrid mitigation techniques combining preprocessing and augmentation.

Findings

Emoji causes high tokenization failure, destroying input signal.

Preprocessing normalization recovers emoji accuracy.

Hybrid training improves robustness on informal variants.

Abstract

We study how informal surface forms degrade NLI accuracy in ELECTRA-small (14M) and RoBERTa-large (355M) across four transforms applied to SNLI and MultiNLI: slang substitution, emoji replacement, Gen-Z filler tokens, and their combination. Slang substitution (replacing formal words with informal equivalents, e.g., "going to" -> "gonna", "friend" -> "homie") causes minimal degradation (at most 1.1pp): slang vocabulary falls largely within WordPiece coverage, so the tokenizer handles it without signal loss. Emoji replaces content words with Unicode characters that ELECTRA's WordPiece tokenizer maps to [UNK], destroying the input signal before any learned parameters see it (93.6% of emoji examples contain at least one [UNK], mean 2.91 per example). Noise tokens (no cap, deadass, tbh) are fully in-vocabulary but absent from NLI training data, consistent with the model assigning them inferential weight they do not carry. The two failure modes respond to different interventions: preprocessing recovers emoji accuracy by normalizing text before tokenization; augmentation handles noise by exposing the model to noise-bearing examples during training. A hybrid of both achieves 88.93% on the combined variant for ELECTRA on SNLI (up from 75.88%), with no statistically significant drop on clean text. Against GPT-4o-mini zero-shot, unmitigated ELECTRA is significantly worse on transformed variants (p < 0.0001); hybrid ELECTRA surpasses it across all SNLI variants and reaches statistical parity on MultiNLI.