Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Natural Language Processing: Results of a Large-Scale Empirical Study

Aditya Siddhant, Zachary C. Lipton


Abstract
Several recent papers investigate Active Learning (AL) for mitigating the data dependence of deep learning for natural language processing. However, the applicability of AL to real-world problems remains an open question. While in supervised learning, practitioners can try many different methods, evaluating each against a validation set before selecting a model, AL affords no such luxury. Over the course of one AL run, an agent annotates its dataset exhausting its labeling budget. Thus, given a new task, we have no opportunity to compare models and acquisition functions. This paper provides a large-scale empirical study of deep active learning, addressing multiple tasks and, for each, multiple datasets, multiple models, and a full suite of acquisition functions. We find that across all settings, Bayesian active learning by disagreement, using uncertainty estimates provided either by Dropout or Bayes-by-Backprop significantly improves over i.i.d. baselines and usually outperforms classic uncertainty sampling.
Anthology ID:
D18-1318
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2904–2909
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1318
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1318
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aditya Siddhant and Zachary C. Lipton. 2018. Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Natural Language Processing: Results of a Large-Scale Empirical Study. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2904–2909, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Natural Language Processing: Results of a Large-Scale Empirical Study (Siddhant & Lipton, EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1318.pdf
Data
CoNLL 2003