What's wrong with your model? A Quantitative Analysis of Relation Classification

Elisa Bassignana, Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank

Abstract: With the aim of improving the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on a target task, a standard strategy in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research is to design a new model, or modify the existing SOTA, and then benchmark its performance on the target task. We argue in favor of enriching this chain of actions by a preliminary error-guided analysis: First, explore weaknesses by analyzing the hard cases where the existing model fails, and then target the improvement based on those. Interpretable evaluation has received little attention for structured prediction tasks. Therefore we propose the first in-depth analysis suite for Relation Classification (RC), and show its effectiveness through a case study. We propose a set of potentially influential attributes to focus on (e.g., entity distance, sentence length). Then, we bucket our datasets based on these attributes, and weight the importance of them through correlations. This allows us to identify highly challenging scenarios for the RC model. By exploiting the findings of our analysis, with a carefully targeted adjustment to our architecture, we effectively improve the performance over the baseline by >3 Micro-F1.