Interpreting the performance of deep learning models beyond test set accuracy is challenging. Characteristics of individual data points are often not considered during evaluation, and each data point is treated equally. We examine the impact of a test set question's difficulty to determine if there is a relationship between difficulty and performance. We model difficulty using well-studied psychometric methods on human response patterns. Experiments on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Sentiment Analysis (SA) show that the likelihood of answering a question correctly is impacted by the question's difficulty. As DNNs are trained with more data, easy examples are learned more quickly than hard examples.
There has been work in the NLP community around modeling latent characteristics of data @cite_5 and annotators , but none that apply the resulting metrics to interpret DNN models. model the probability a label is correct with the probability of an annotator to label an item correctly according to the model, but do not consider difficulty or discriminatory ability of the data points.
@cite_5
2128669672
In this paper, we describe a case study of a sentence-level categorization in which tagging instructions are developed and used by four judges to classify clauses from the Wall Street Journal as either subjective or objective. Agreement among the four judges is analyzed, and based on that analysis, each clause is given a final classification. To provide empirical support for the classifications, correlations are assessed in the data between the subjective category and a basic semantic class posited by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (1985).