An Approach to the Frugal Use of Human Annotators to Scale up Auto-coding for Text Classification Tasks

Li’An Chen, Hanna Suominen


Abstract
Human annotation for establishing the training data is often a very costly process in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which has led to frugal NLP approaches becoming an important research topic. Many research teams struggle to complete projects with limited funding, labor, and computational resources. Driven by the Move-Step analytic framework theorized in the applied linguistics field, our study offers a rigorous approach to the frugal use of two human annotators to scale up auto-coding for text classification tasks. We applied the Linear Support Vector Machine algorithm to text classification of a job ad corpus. Our Cohen’s Kappa for inter-rater agreement and Area Under the Curve (AUC) values reached averages of 0.76 and 0.80, respectively. The calculated time consumption for our human training process was 36 days. The results indicated that even the strategic and frugal use of only two human annotators could enable the efficient training of classifiers with reasonably good performance. This study does not aim to provide generalizability of the results. Rather, we propose that the annotation strategies arising from this study be considered by our readers only if such strategies are fit for one’s specific research purposes.
Anthology ID:
2021.alta-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the The 19th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association
Month:
December
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
ALTA
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Publisher:
Australasian Language Technology Association
Note:
Pages:
12–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.alta-1.2
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Li’An Chen and Hanna Suominen. 2021. An Approach to the Frugal Use of Human Annotators to Scale up Auto-coding for Text Classification Tasks. In Proceedings of the The 19th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association, pages 12–21, Online. Australasian Language Technology Association.
Cite (Informal):
An Approach to the Frugal Use of Human Annotators to Scale up Auto-coding for Text Classification Tasks (Chen & Suominen, ALTA 2021)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.alta-1.2.pdf