Can Pretrained Language Models Derive Correct Semantics from Corrupt
  Subwords under Noise?
Xinzhe Li Ming Liu Shang Gao
For Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), their susceptibility to noise has
recently been linked to subword segmentation. However, it is unclear which
aspects of segmentation affect their understanding. This study assesses the
robustness of PLMs against various disrupted segmentation caused by noise. An
evaluation framework for subword segmentation, named Contrastive Lexical
Semantic (CoLeS) probe, is proposed. It provides a systematic categorization of
segmentation corruption under noise and evaluation protocols by generating
contrastive datasets with canonical-noisy word pairs. Experimental results
indicate that PLMs are unable to accurately compute word meanings if the noise
introduces completely different subwords, small subword fragments, or a large
number of additional subwords, particularly when they are inserted within other
subwords.