The absence of labeled data for training neural models is often addressed by leveraging knowledge about the specific task, resulting in heuristic but noisy labels. The knowledge is captured in labeling functions, which detect certain regularities or patterns in the training samples and annotate corresponding labels for training. This process of weakly supervised training may result in an over-reliance on the signals captured by the labeling functions and hinder models to exploit other signals or to generalize well. We propose KnowMAN, an adversarial scheme that enables to control influence of signals associated with specific labeling functions. KnowMAN forces the network to learn representations that are invariant to those signals and to pick up other signals that are more generally associated with an output label. KnowMAN strongly improves results compared to direct weakly supervised learning with a pre-trained transformer language model and a feature-based baseline.

The performance of a Part-of-speech (POS) tagger is highly dependent on the domain of the processed text, and for many domains there is no or only very little training data available. This work addresses the problem of POS tagging noisy user-generated text using a neural network. We propose an architecture that trains an out-of-domain model on a large newswire corpus, and transfers those weights by using them as a prior for a model trained on the target domain (a data-set of German Tweets) for which there is very little annotations available. The neural network has a standard bidirectional LSTM at its core. However, we find it crucial to also encode a set of task-specific features, and to obtain reliable (source-domain and target-domain) word representations. Experiments with different regularization techniques such as early stopping, dropout and fine-tuning the domain adaptation prior weights are conducted. Our best model uses external weights from the out-of-domain model, as well as feature embeddings, pre-trained word and sub-word embeddings and achieves a tagging accuracy of slightly over 90%, improving on the previous state of the art for this task.