Bayesian Methods for Semi-supervised Text Annotation

Kristian Miok, Gregor Pirs, Marko Robnik-Sikonja


Abstract
Human annotations are an important source of information in the development of natural language understanding approaches. As under the pressure of productivity annotators can assign different labels to a given text, the quality of produced annotations frequently varies. This is especially the case if decisions are difficult, with high cognitive load, requires awareness of broader context, or careful consideration of background knowledge. To alleviate the problem, we propose two semi-supervised methods to guide the annotation process: a Bayesian deep learning model and a Bayesian ensemble method. Using a Bayesian deep learning method, we can discover annotations that cannot be trusted and might require reannotation. A recently proposed Bayesian ensemble method helps us to combine the annotators’ labels with predictions of trained models. According to the results obtained from three hate speech detection experiments, the proposed Bayesian methods can improve the annotations and prediction performance of BERT models.
Anthology ID:
2020.law-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
SIGANN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–12
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.law-1.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kristian Miok, Gregor Pirs, and Marko Robnik-Sikonja. 2020. Bayesian Methods for Semi-supervised Text Annotation. In Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 1–12, Barcelona, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bayesian Methods for Semi-supervised Text Annotation (Miok et al., LAW 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.law-1.1.pdf
Data
Hate Speech and Offensive Language