ULF: Unsupervised Labeling Function Correction using Cross-Validation for Weak Supervision

Anastasiia Sedova, Benjamin Roth


Abstract
A cost-effective alternative to manual data labeling is weak supervision (WS), where data samples are automatically annotated using a predefined set of labeling functions (LFs), rule-based mechanisms that generate artificial labels for the associated classes. In this work, we investigate noise reduction techniques for WS based on the principle of k-fold cross-validation. We introduce a new algorithm ULF for Unsupervised Labeling Function correction, which denoises WS data by leveraging models trained on all but some LFs to identify and correct biases specific to the held-out LFs. Specifically, ULF refines the allocation of LFs to classes by re-estimating this assignment on highly reliable cross-validated samples. Evaluation on multiple datasets confirms ULF’s effectiveness in enhancing WS learning without the need for manual labeling.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.254
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4162–4176
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.254
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.254
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anastasiia Sedova and Benjamin Roth. 2023. ULF: Unsupervised Labeling Function Correction using Cross-Validation for Weak Supervision. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4162–4176, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ULF: Unsupervised Labeling Function Correction using Cross-Validation for Weak Supervision (Sedova & Roth, EMNLP 2023)
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