NoisywikiHow: A Benchmark for Learning with Real-world Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing

Tingting Wu, Xiao Ding, Minji Tang, Hao Zhang, Bing Qin, Ting Liu


Abstract
Large-scale datasets in the real world inevitably involve label noise. Deep models can gradually overfit noisy labels and thus degrade model generalization. To mitigate the effects of label noise, learning with noisy labels (LNL) methods are designed to achieve better generalization performance. Due to the lack of suitable datasets, previous studies have frequently employed synthetic label noise to mimic real-world label noise. However, synthetic noise is not instance-dependent, making this approximation not always effective in practice. Recent research has proposed benchmarks for learning with real-world noisy labels. However, the noise sources within may be single or fuzzy, making benchmarks different from data with heterogeneous label noises in the real world. To tackle these issues, we contribute NoisywikiHow, the largest NLP benchmark built with minimal supervision. Specifically, inspired by human cognition, we explicitly construct multiple sources of label noise to imitate human errors throughout the annotation, replicating real-world noise, whose corruption is affected by both ground-truth labels and instances. Moreover, we provide a variety of noise levels to support controlled experiments on noisy data, enabling us to evaluate LNL methods systematically and comprehensively. After that, we conduct extensive multi-dimensional experiments on a broad range of LNL methods, obtaining new and intriguing findings.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.299
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4856–4873
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.299
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.299
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tingting Wu, Xiao Ding, Minji Tang, Hao Zhang, Bing Qin, and Ting Liu. 2023. NoisywikiHow: A Benchmark for Learning with Real-world Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 4856–4873, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NoisywikiHow: A Benchmark for Learning with Real-world Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing (Wu et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.299.pdf