Reducing Confusion in Active Learning for Part-Of-Speech Tagging
Aditi Chaudhary, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Zaid Sheikh, Graham Neubig
Abstract
Active learning (AL) uses a data selection algorithm to select useful training samples to minimize annotation cost. This is now an essential tool for building low-resource syntactic analyzers such as part-of-speech (POS) taggers. Existing AL heuristics are generally designed on the principle of selecting uncertain yet representative training instances, where annotating these instances may reduce a large number of errors. However, in an empirical study across six typologically diverse languages (German, Swedish, Galician, North Sami, Persian, and Ukrainian), we found the surprising result that even in an oracle scenario where we know the true uncertainty of predictions, these current heuristics are far from optimal. Based on this analysis, we pose the problem of AL as selecting instances that maximally reduce the confusion between particular pairs of output tags. Extensive experimentation on the aforementioned languages shows that our proposed AL strategy outperforms other AL strategies by a significant margin. We also present auxiliary results demonstrating the importance of proper calibration of models, which we ensure through cross-view training, and analysis demonstrating how our proposed strategy selects examples that more closely follow the oracle data distribution. The code is publicly released here.1- Anthology ID:
- 2021.tacl-1.1
- Volume:
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9
- Month:
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Editors:
- Brian Roark, Ani Nenkova
- Venue:
- TACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1–16
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.tacl-1.1
- DOI:
- 10.1162/tacl_a_00350
- Cite (ACL):
- Aditi Chaudhary, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Zaid Sheikh, and Graham Neubig. 2021. Reducing Confusion in Active Learning for Part-Of-Speech Tagging. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 9:1–16.
- Cite (Informal):
- Reducing Confusion in Active Learning for Part-Of-Speech Tagging (Chaudhary et al., TACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.tacl-1.1.pdf