The Art of Abstention: Selective Prediction and Error Regularization for Natural Language Processing

In selective prediction, a classifier is allowed to abstain from making predictions on low-confidence examples. Though this setting is interesting and important, selective prediction has rarely been examined in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To fill this void in the literature, we study in this paper selective prediction for NLP, comparing different models and confidence estimators. We further propose a simple error regularization trick that improves confidence estimation without substantially increasing the computation budget. We show that recent pre-trained transformer models simultaneously improve both model accuracy and confidence estimation effectiveness. We also find that our proposed regularization improves confidence estimation and can be applied to other relevant scenarios, such as using classifier cascades for accuracy–efficiency trade-offs. Source code for this paper can be found at https://github.com/castorini/transformers-selective.