Using calibrator to improve robustness in Machine Reading Comprehension

Abstract: Machine Reading Comprehension(MRC) has achieved a remarkable result since some powerful models, such as BERT, are proposed. However, these models are not robust enough and vulnerable to adversarial input perturbation and generalization examples. Some works tried to improve the performance on specific types of data by adding some related examples into training data while it leads to degradation on the original dataset, because the shift of data distribution makes the answer ranking based on the softmax probability of model unreliable. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the robustness by using a calibrator as the post-hoc reranker, which is implemented based on XGBoost model. The calibrator combines both manual features and representation learning features to rerank candidate results. Experimental results on adversarial datasets show that our model can achieve performance improvement by more than 10\% and also make improvement on the original and generalization datasets.