Data sharing restrictions are common in NLP, especially in the clinical domain, but there is limited research on adapting models to new domains without access to the original training data, a setting known as source-free domain adaptation. We take algorithms that traditionally assume access to the source-domain training data—active learning, self-training, and data augmentation—and adapt them for source free domain adaptation. Then we systematically compare these different strategies across multiple tasks and domains. We find that active learning yields consistent gains across all SemEval 2021 Task 10 tasks and domains, but though the shared task saw successful self-trained and data augmented models, our systematic comparison finds these strategies to be unreliable for source-free domain adaptation.

This paper presents the Source-Free Domain Adaptation shared task held within SemEval-2021. The aim of the task was to explore adaptation of machine-learning models in the face of data sharing constraints. Specifically, we consider the scenario where annotations exist for a domain but cannot be shared. Instead, participants are provided with models trained on that (source) data. Participants also receive some labeled data from a new (development) domain on which to explore domain adaptation algorithms. Participants are then tested on data representing a new (target) domain. We explored this scenario with two different semantic tasks: negation detection (a text classification task) and time expression recognition (a sequence tagging task).

This paper describes our systems for negation detection and time expression recognition in SemEval 2021 Task 10, Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Processing. We show that self-training, active learning and data augmentation techniques can improve the generalization ability of the model on the unlabeled target domain data without accessing source domain data. We also perform detailed ablation studies and error analyses for our time expression recognition systems to identify the source of the performance improvement and give constructive feedback on the temporal normalization annotation guidelines.