Combining Active Learning and Task Adaptation with BERT for Cost-Effective Annotation of Social Media Datasets

Jens Lemmens, Walter Daelemans


Abstract
Social media provide a rich source of data that can be mined and used for a wide variety of research purposes. However, annotating this data can be expensive, yet necessary for state-of-the-art pre-trained language models to achieve high prediction performance. Therefore, we combine pool-based active learning based on prediction uncertainty (an established method for reducing annotation costs) with unsupervised task adaptation through Masked Language Modeling (MLM). The results on three different datasets (two social media corpora, one benchmark dataset) show that task adaptation significantly improves results and that with only a fraction of the available training data, this approach reaches similar F1-scores as those achieved by an upper-bound baseline model fine-tuned on all training data. We hereby contribute to the scarce corpus of research on active learning with pre-trained language models and propose a cost-efficient annotation sampling and fine-tuning approach that can be applied to a wide variety of tasks and datasets.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
237–250
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jens Lemmens and Walter Daelemans. 2023. Combining Active Learning and Task Adaptation with BERT for Cost-Effective Annotation of Social Media Datasets. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 237–250, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Combining Active Learning and Task Adaptation with BERT for Cost-Effective Annotation of Social Media Datasets (Lemmens & Daelemans, WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.22.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.22.mp4