In this paper, we present a novel algorithm, FastWordBug, to efficiently
generate small text perturbations in a black-box setting that forces a
sentiment analysis or text classification mode to make an incorrect prediction.
By combining the part of speech attributes of words, we propose a scoring
method that can quickly identify important words that affect text
classification. We evaluate FastWordBug on three real-world text datasets and
two state-of-the-art machine learning models under black-box setting. The
results show that our method can significantly reduce the accuracy of the
model, and at the same time, we can call the model as little as possible, with
the highest attack efficiency. We also attack two popular real-world cloud
services of NLP, and the results show that our method works as well.