Discover, Explain, Improve: An Automatic Slice Detection Benchmark for Natural Language Processing

Pretrained natural language processing (NLP) models have achieved high overall perfor-mance, but they still make systematic errors. Instead of manual error analysis, research on slice detection models (SDMs), which au-tomatically identify underperforming groups of datapoints, has caught escalated attention in Computer Vision for both understanding model behaviors and providing insights for future model training and designing. How-ever, little research on SDMs and quantitative evaluation of their effectiveness have been conducted on NLP tasks. Our paper fills the gap by proposing a benchmark named ‘‘Discover, Explain, Improve (DEIM)’’ for classification NLP tasks along with a new SDM Edisa. Edisa discovers coherent and underperforming groups of datapoints; DEIM then unites them under human-understandable concepts and provides comprehensive evaluation tasks and corresponding quantitative metrics. The evaluation in DEIM shows that Edisa can accurately select error-prone data-points with informative semantic features that summarize error patterns. Detecting difficult datapoints directly boosts model performance without tuning any original model parameters, showing that discovered slices are actionable for users.¹.