The Topological BERT: Transforming Attention into Topology for Natural Language Processing

In recent years, the introduction of the Transformer models sparked a revolution in natural language processing (NLP). BERT was one of the first text encoders using only the attention mechanism without any recurrent parts to achieve state-of-the-art results on many NLP tasks. This paper introduces a text classifier using topological data analysis. We use BERT's attention maps transformed into attention graphs as the only input to that classifier. The model can solve tasks such as distinguishing spam from ham messages, recognizing whether a sentence is grammatically correct, or evaluating a movie review as negative or positive. It performs comparably to the BERT baseline and outperforms it on some tasks. Additionally, we propose a new method to reduce the number of BERT's attention heads considered by the topological classifier, which allows us to prune the number of heads from 144 down to as few as ten with no reduction in performance. Our work also shows that the topological model displays higher robustness against adversarial attacks than the original BERT model, which is maintained during the pruning process. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to confront topological-based models with adversarial attacks in the context of NLP.