PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling

Evaluating models on the task of paraphrase detection by providing pairs of sentences that are either paraphrases or not.

Overview

PAWS is a dataset designed for evaluating models on the task of paraphrase detection by providing pairs of sentences that are either paraphrases or not, facilitating the training and benchmarking of natural language understanding systems.

Usage

Installation

There are two ways of using Inspect Evals, from pypi as a dependency of your own project and as a standalone checked out GitHub repository.

If you are using it from pypi, install the package and its dependencies via:

pip install inspect-evals

If you are using Inspect Evals in its repository, start by installing the necessary dependencies with:

uv sync

Running evaluations

Now you can start evaluating models. For simplicity’s sake, this section assumes you are using Inspect Evals from the standalone repo. If that’s not the case and you are not using uv to manage dependencies in your own project, you can use the same commands with uv run dropped.

uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/paws --model openai/gpt-5-nano

You can also import tasks as normal Python objects and run them from python:

from inspect_ai import eval
from inspect_evals.paws import paws
eval(paws)

After running evaluations, you can view their logs using the inspect view command:

uv run inspect view

For VS Code, you can also download Inspect AI extension for viewing logs.

If you don’t want to specify the --model each time you run an evaluation, create a .env configuration file in your working directory that defines the INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL environment variable along with your API key. For example:

INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL=anthropic/claude-opus-4-1-20250805
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=<anthropic-api-key>

Options

You can control a variety of options from the command line. For example:

uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/paws --limit 10
uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/paws --max-connections 10
uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/paws --temperature 0.5

See uv run inspect eval --help for all available options.

Parameters

paws

• shuffle (bool): (default: True)

Dataset

Here is an example from the dataset (after processing by Inspect):

Answer Yes if the following two sentences are paraphrases. If they are not, answer No. Do not give any other answer other than Yes or No in your response. Sentence1: These geographically correspond to the traditional Glasgow District , South , Edinburgh District , and North and Midlands districts . Sentence2: These geographically roughly correspond to the traditional districts of Glasgow District , South , Edinburgh District and North and Midlands . Yes

Scoring

A simple accuracy is calculated over the datapoints.