Re-weighting Tokens: A Simple and Effective Active Learning Strategy for Named Entity Recognition

Haocheng Luo, Wei Tan, Ngoc Nguyen, Lan Du


Abstract
Active learning, a widely adopted technique for enhancing machine learning models in text and image classification tasks with limited annotation resources, has received relatively little attention in the domain of Named Entity Recognition (NER). The challenge of data imbalance in NER has hindered the effectiveness of active learning, as sequence labellers lack sufficient learning signals. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel re-weighting-based active learning strategy that assigns dynamic smoothing weights to individual tokens. This adaptable strategy is compatible with various token-level acquisition functions and contributes to the development of robust active learners. Experimental results on multiple corpora demonstrate the substantial performance improvement achieved by incorporating our re-weighting strategy into existing acquisition functions, validating its practical efficacy. We will release our implementation upon the publication of this paper.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.847
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12725–12734
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.847
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.847
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haocheng Luo, Wei Tan, Ngoc Nguyen, and Lan Du. 2023. Re-weighting Tokens: A Simple and Effective Active Learning Strategy for Named Entity Recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 12725–12734, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Re-weighting Tokens: A Simple and Effective Active Learning Strategy for Named Entity Recognition (Luo et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.847.pdf