AI RESEARCH
When Informal Text Breaks NLI: Tokenization Failure, Distribution Shift, and Targeted Mitigations
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2604.16787v1 Announce Type: new We study how informal surface forms degrade NLI accuracy in ELECTRA-small (14M) and RoBERTa-large (355M) across four transforms applied to SNLI and MultiNLI: slang substitution, emoji replacement, Gen-Z filler tokens, and their combination. Slang substitution (replacing formal words with informal equivalents, e.g., "going to" -> "gonna", "friend" -> "homie") causes minimal degradation (at most 1.1pp): slang vocabulary falls largely within WordPiece coverage, so the tokenizer handles it without signal loss.