@inproceedings{cao-etal-2023-pay-attention,
    title = "Pay Attention to the Robustness of {C}hinese Minority Language Models! Syllable-level Textual Adversarial Attack on {T}ibetan Script",
    author = "Cao, Xi  and
      Dawa, Dolma  and
      Qun, Nuo  and
      Nyima, Trashi",
    editor = "Ovalle, Anaelia  and
      Chang, Kai-Wei  and
      Mehrabi, Ninareh  and
      Pruksachatkun, Yada  and
      Galystan, Aram  and
      Dhamala, Jwala  and
      Verma, Apurv  and
      Cao, Trista  and
      Kumar, Anoop  and
      Gupta, Rahul",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.trustnlp-1.4",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.trustnlp-1.4",
    pages = "35--46",
    abstract = "The textual adversarial attack refers to an attack method in which the attacker adds imperceptible perturbations to the original texts by elaborate design so that the NLP (natural language processing) model produces false judgments. This method is also used to evaluate the robustness of NLP models. Currently, most of the research in this field focuses on English, and there is also a certain amount of research on Chinese. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is little research targeting Chinese minority languages. Textual adversarial attacks are a new challenge for the information processing of Chinese minority languages. In response to this situation, we propose a Tibetan syllable-level black-box textual adversarial attack called TSAttacker based on syllable cosine distance and scoring mechanism. And then, we conduct TSAttacker on six models generated by fine-tuning two PLMs (pre-trained language models) for three downstream tasks. The experiment results show that TSAttacker is effective and generates high-quality adversarial samples. In addition, the robustness of the involved models still has much room for improvement.",
}

The textual adversarial attack refers to an attack method in which the attacker adds imperceptible perturbations to the original texts by elaborate design so that the NLP (natural language processing) model produces false judgments. This method is also used to evaluate the robustness of NLP models. Currently, most of the research in this field focuses on English, and there is also a certain amount of research on Chinese. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is little research targeting Chinese minority languages. Textual adversarial attacks are a new challenge for the information processing of Chinese minority languages. In response to this situation, we propose a Tibetan syllable-level black-box textual adversarial attack called TSAttacker based on syllable cosine distance and scoring mechanism. And then, we conduct TSAttacker on six models generated by fine-tuning two PLMs (pre-trained language models) for three downstream tasks. The experiment results show that TSAttacker is effective and generates high-quality adversarial samples. In addition, the robustness of the involved models still has much room for improvement.
Cao, Xi Dawa, Dolma Qun, Nuo Nyima, Trashi
Pay Attention to the Robustness of Chinese Minority Language Models! Syllable-level Textual Adversarial Attack on Tibetan Script