  In recent years, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved
remarkable performance on many natural language processing benchmarks. Despite
their success, prior studies have shown that PLMs are vulnerable to attacks
from adversarial examples. In this work, we focus on the named entity
recognition task and study context-aware adversarial attack methods to examine
the model's robustness. Specifically, we propose perturbing the most
informative words for recognizing entities to create adversarial examples and
investigate different candidate replacement methods to generate natural and
plausible adversarial examples. Experiments and analyses show that our methods
are more effective in deceiving the model into making wrong predictions than
strong baselines.
