PyTAIL: An Open Source Tool for Interactive and Incremental Learning of NLP Models with Human in the Loop for Online Data

Shubhanshu Mishra, Jana Diesner


Abstract
Online data streams make training machine learning models hard because of distribution shift and new patterns emerging over time. For natural language processing (NLP) tasks that utilize a collection of features based on lexicons and rules, it is important to adapt these features to the changing data. To address this challenge we introduce PyTAIL, a python library, which allows a human in the loop approach to actively train NLP models. PyTAIL enhances generic active learning, which only suggests new instances to label by also suggesting new features like rules and lexicons to label. Furthermore, PyTAIL is flexible enough for users to accept, reject, or update rules and lexicons as the model is being trained. Finally, we simulate the performance of PyTAIL on existing social media benchmark datasets for text classification. We compare various active learning strategies on these benchmarks. The model closes the gap with as few as 10% of the training data. Finally, we also highlight the importance of tracking evaluation metric on remaining data (which is not yet merged with active learning) alongside the test dataset. This highlights the effectiveness of the model in accurately annotating the remaining dataset, which is especially suitable for batch processing of large unlabelled corpora. PyTAIL will be open sourced and available at https://github.com/socialmediaie/pytail.
Anthology ID:
2023.nlposs-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop for Natural Language Processing Open Source Software (NLP-OSS 2023)
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Liling Tan, Dmitrijs Milajevs, Geeticka Chauhan, Jeremy Gwinnup, Elijah Rippeth
Venues:
NLPOSS | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
190–198
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.nlposs-1.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shubhanshu Mishra and Jana Diesner. 2023. PyTAIL: An Open Source Tool for Interactive and Incremental Learning of NLP Models with Human in the Loop for Online Data. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop for Natural Language Processing Open Source Software (NLP-OSS 2023), pages 190–198, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PyTAIL: An Open Source Tool for Interactive and Incremental Learning of NLP Models with Human in the Loop for Online Data (Mishra & Diesner, NLPOSS-WS 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.22.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.22.mp4