Title
Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList
Abstract
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.
Year
Venue
DocType
2020
ACL
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
2020.acl-main
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2020
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Tulio Ribeiro154621.68
Tongshuang Wu2236.09
Carlos Guestrin39220488.92
Sameer Singh4106071.63