Metamorphic Testing for Evaluating Robustness of Sentiment Analysis Models
Sowjanya Karanam, Jayanth Bhargav
Abstract
Machine learning systems are challenging to test using traditional software testing methods because their behavior is learned from data rather than explicitly programmed. This challenge is particularly significant in natural language processing (NLP), where small input variations can lead to unexpected model behavior. Conventional evaluation metrics, such as accuracy and F1-score, often fail to capture such inconsistencies. Metamorphic testing addresses this limitation by evaluating expected relationships between original and transformed inputs. With the increasing prevalence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and language-based AI systems, the need for systematic robustness testing has become even more pronounced. Motivated by this growing need, this paper presents a lightweight, batch-based metamorphic testing approach for evaluating the robustness of such systems. In particular, we consider sentiment analysis as a representative NLP task and evaluate a pretrained classifier under four transformations: synonym replacement, typo injection, word-order variation, and negation. Using consistency score, flip accuracy, and confidence change, we identify strengths in handling semantic variations and vulnerabilities to textual noise and logical transformations. These findings highlight the value of metamorphic testing in identifying behavioral inconsistencies beyond conventional performance metrics and demonstrate its potential as a systematic framework for evaluating the robustness of language-based AI systems and guiding performance improvements before deployment.