Large pre-trained language models such as BERT have been widely used as a framework for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. However, recent findings have revealed that pre-trained language models are insensitive to word order. The performance on NLU tasks remains unchanged even after randomly permuting the word of a sentence, where crucial syntactic information is destroyed. To help preserve the importance of word order, we propose a simple approach called Forced Invalidation (FI): forcing the model to identify permuted sequences as invalid samples. We perform an extensive evaluation of our approach on various English NLU and QA based tasks over BERT-based and attention-based models over word embeddings. Our experiments demonstrate that Forced Invalidation significantly improves the sensitivity of the models to word order.
@article{arxiv.2304.05221,
title = {Towards preserving word order importance through Forced Invalidation},
author = {Hadeel Al-Negheimish and Pranava Madhyastha and Alessandra Russo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.05221},
year = {2023}
}