English

TextAttack: A Framework for Adversarial Attacks, Data Augmentation, and Adversarial Training in NLP

Computation and Language 2020-10-06 v4 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

While there has been substantial research using adversarial attacks to analyze NLP models, each attack is implemented in its own code repository. It remains challenging to develop NLP attacks and utilize them to improve model performance. This paper introduces TextAttack, a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and adversarial training in NLP. TextAttack builds attacks from four components: a goal function, a set of constraints, a transformation, and a search method. TextAttack's modular design enables researchers to easily construct attacks from combinations of novel and existing components. TextAttack provides implementations of 16 adversarial attacks from the literature and supports a variety of models and datasets, including BERT and other transformers, and all GLUE tasks. TextAttack also includes data augmentation and adversarial training modules for using components of adversarial attacks to improve model accuracy and robustness. TextAttack is democratizing NLP: anyone can try data augmentation and adversarial training on any model or dataset, with just a few lines of code. Code and tutorials are available at https://github.com/QData/TextAttack.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.05909,
  title  = {TextAttack: A Framework for Adversarial Attacks, Data Augmentation, and Adversarial Training in NLP},
  author = {John X. Morris and Eli Lifland and Jin Yong Yoo and Jake Grigsby and Di Jin and Yanjun Qi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.05909},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

6 pages. More details are shared at https://github.com/QData/TextAttack

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:29:41.975Z