Co-training for Low Resource Scientific Natural Language Inference

Mobashir Sadat, Cornelia Caragea


Abstract
Scientific Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of predicting the semantic relation between a pair of sentences extracted from research articles. The automatic annotation method based on distant supervision for the training set of SciNLI, the first and most popular dataset for this task, results in label noise which inevitably degenerates the performance of classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel co-training method that assigns weights based on the training dynamics of the classifiers to the distantly supervised labels, reflective of the manner they are used in the subsequent training epochs. That is, unlike the existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches, we consider the historical behavior of the classifiers to evaluate the quality of the automatically annotated labels. Furthermore, by assigning importance weights instead of filtering out examples based on an arbitrary threshold on the predicted confidence, we maximize the usage of automatically labeled data, while ensuring that the noisy labels have a minimal impact on model training. The proposed method obtains an improvement of 1.5% in Macro F1 over the distant supervision baseline, and substantial improvements over several other strong SSL baselines. We make our code and data available on Github.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.139
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2538–2550
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.139
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mobashir Sadat and Cornelia Caragea. 2024. Co-training for Low Resource Scientific Natural Language Inference. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2538–2550, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Co-training for Low Resource Scientific Natural Language Inference (Sadat & Caragea, ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.139.pdf