Benjamin Allen


2019

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Practical, Efficient, and Customizable Active Learning for Named Entity Recognition in the Digital Humanities
Alexander Erdmann | David Joseph Wrisley | Benjamin Allen | Christopher Brown | Sophie Cohen-Bodénès | Micha Elsner | Yukun Feng | Brian Joseph | Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Scholars in inter-disciplinary fields like the Digital Humanities are increasingly interested in semantic annotation of specialized corpora. Yet, under-resourced languages, imperfect or noisily structured data, and user-specific classification tasks make it difficult to meet their needs using off-the-shelf models. Manual annotation of large corpora from scratch, meanwhile, can be prohibitively expensive. Thus, we propose an active learning solution for named entity recognition, attempting to maximize a custom model’s improvement per additional unit of manual annotation. Our system robustly handles any domain or user-defined label set and requires no external resources, enabling quality named entity recognition for Humanities corpora where such resources are not available. Evaluating on typologically disparate languages and datasets, we reduce required annotation by 20-60% and greatly outperform a competitive active learning baseline.