# Looking at the Overlooked: An Analysis on the Word-Overlap Bias in Natural Language Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03862 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03862/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01130/) (2019)
- [Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01042/) (2018)
- [PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11828/) (2019)
- [Stress Test Evaluation for Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00692/) (2018)
- [WANLI: Worker and AI Collaboration for Natural Language Inference Dataset Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05955/) (2022)
- [Towards Debiasing Fact Verification Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05267/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Study on Robustness to Spurious Correlations using Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06778/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Bias Mitigation by Modelling Biases in Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06321/) (2019)
- [Unlearn Dataset Bias in Natural Language Inference by Fitting the Residual](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10763/) (2019)
- [Towards Debiasing NLU Models from Unknown Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12303/) (2020)
- [Competency Problems: On Finding and Removing Artifacts in Language Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08646/) (2021)
- [Syntactic Data Augmentation Increases Robustness to Inference Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11999/) (2020)
- [Mind the Trade-off: Debiasing NLU Models without Degrading the In-distribution Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00315/) (2020)
- [Learning from others' mistakes: Avoiding dataset biases without modeling them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01300/) (2020)
- [Generalization in NLI: Ways (Not) To Go Beyond Simple Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01518/) (2021)
- [Generating Data to Mitigate Spurious Correlations in Natural Language Inference Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12942/) (2022)
- [Don't Take the Premise for Granted: Mitigating Artifacts in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04380/) (2019)
- [ANLIzing the Adversarial Natural Language Inference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12729/) (2020)
- [Towards Robustifying NLI Models Against Lexical Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04732/) (2020)
- [Are All Spurious Features in Natural Language Alike? An Analysis through a Causal Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14011/) (2022)
- [Avoiding Inference Heuristics in Few-shot Prompt-based Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04144/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Factorization Curse: Which Tokens You Predict Underlie the Reversal Curse and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05183/) (2024)
- [Robust Natural Language Understanding with Residual Attention Debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17627/) (2023)
- [Confounder Balancing in Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Pre-Trained Large Models Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16062/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It has been shown that NLI models are usually biased with respect to the word-overlap between premise and hypothesis; they take this feature as a primary cue for predicting the entailment label. In this paper, we focus on an overlooked aspect of the overlap bias in NLI models: the reverse word-overlap bias. Our experimental results demonstrate that current NLI models are highly biased towards the non-entailment label on instances with low overlap, and the existing debiasing methods, which are reportedly successful on existing challenge datasets, are generally ineffective in addressing this category of bias. We investigate the reasons for the emergence of the overlap bias and the role of minority examples in its mitigation. For the former, we find that the word-overlap bias does not stem from pre-training, and for the latter, we observe that in contrast to the accepted assumption, eliminating minority examples does not affect the generalizability of debiasing methods with respect to the overlap bias.