VerifyMatch: A Semi-Supervised Learning Paradigm for Natural Language Inference with Confidence-Aware MixUp

Seo Yeon Park, Cornelia Caragea


Abstract
While natural language inference (NLI) has emerged as a prominent task for evaluating a model’s capability to perform natural language understanding, creating large benchmarks for training deep learning models imposes a significant challenge since it requires extensive human annotations. To overcome this, we propose to construct pseudo-generated samples (premise-hypothesis pairs) using class-specific fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) thereby reducing the human effort and the costs in annotating large amounts of data. However, despite the impressive performance of LLMs, it is necessary to verify that the pseudo-generated labels are actually correct. Towards this goal, in this paper, we propose VerifyMatch, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) approach in which the LLM pseudo-labels guide the training of the SSL model and, at the same time, the SSL model acts as a verifier of the LLM-generated data. In our approach, we retain all pseudo-labeled samples, but to ensure unlabeled data quality, we further propose to use MixUp whenever the verifier does not agree with the LLM-generated label or when they both agree on the label but the verifier has a low confidence—lower than an adaptive confidence threshold. We achieve competitive accuracy compared to strong baselines for NLI datasets in low-resource settings.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1076
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19319–19335
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1076
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1076
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seo Yeon Park and Cornelia Caragea. 2024. VerifyMatch: A Semi-Supervised Learning Paradigm for Natural Language Inference with Confidence-Aware MixUp. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 19319–19335, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VerifyMatch: A Semi-Supervised Learning Paradigm for Natural Language Inference with Confidence-Aware MixUp (Park & Caragea, EMNLP 2024)
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