BERT Goes Off-Topic: Investigating the Domain Transfer Challenge using
  Genre Classification
Dmitri Roussinov Serge Sharoff
While performance of many text classification tasks has been recently
improved due to Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), in this paper we show that
they still suffer from a performance gap when the underlying distribution of
topics changes. For example, a genre classifier trained on \textit{political}
topics often fails when tested on documents about \textit{sport} or
\textit{medicine}. In this work, we quantify this phenomenon empirically with a
large corpus and a large set of topics. Consequently, we verify that domain
transfer remains challenging both for classic PLMs, such as BERT, and for
modern large models, such as GPT-3. We also suggest and successfully test a
possible remedy: after augmenting the training dataset with
topically-controlled synthetic texts, the F1 score improves by up to 50\% for
some topics, nearing on-topic training results, while others show little to no
improvement. While our empirical results focus on genre classification, our
methodology is applicable to other classification tasks such as gender,
authorship, or sentiment classification. The code and data to replicate the
experiments are available at https://github.com/dminus1/genre