Learning with Different Amounts of Annotation: From Zero to Many Labels

Shujian Zhang, Chengyue Gong, Eunsol Choi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Training NLP systems typically assumes access to annotated data that has a single human label per example. Given imperfect labeling from annotators and inherent ambiguity of language, we hypothesize that single label is not sufficient to learn the spectrum of language interpretation. We explore new annotation distribution schemes, assigning multiple labels per example for a small subset of training examples. Introducing such multi label examples at the cost of annotating fewer examples brings clear gains on natural language inference task and entity typing task, even when we simply first train with a single label data and then fine tune with multi label examples. Extending a MixUp data augmentation framework, we propose a learning algorithm that can learn from training examples with different amount of annotation (with zero, one, or multiple labels). This algorithm efficiently combines signals from uneven training data and brings additional gains in low annotation budget and cross domain settings. Together, our method achieves consistent gains in two tasks, suggesting distributing labels unevenly among training examples can be beneficial for many NLP tasks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2021 - 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages7620-7632
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917094
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2021 - Virtual, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Duration: Nov 7 2021Nov 11 2021

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2021 - 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings

Conference

Conference2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2021
Country/TerritoryDominican Republic
CityVirtual, Punta Cana
Period11/7/2111/11/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

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