Active Learning Design Choices for NER with Transformers

Robert Vacareanu, Enrique Noriega-Atala, Gus Hahn-Powell, Marco A. Valenzuela-Escarcega, Mihai Surdeanu


Abstract
We explore multiple important choices that have not been analyzed in conjunction regarding active learning for token classification using transformer networks. These choices are: (i) how to select what to annotate, (ii) decide whether to annotate entire sentences or smaller sentence fragments, (iii) how to train with incomplete annotations at token-level, and (iv) how to select the initial seed dataset. We explore whether annotating at sub-sentence level can translate to an improved downstream performance by considering two different sub-sentence annotation strategies: (i) entity-level, and (ii) token-level. These approaches result in some sentences being only partially annotated. To address this issue, we introduce and evaluate multiple strategies to deal with partially-annotated sentences during the training process. We show that annotating at the sub-sentence level achieves comparable or better performance than sentence-level annotations with a smaller number of annotated tokens. We then explore the extent to which the performance gap remains once accounting for the annotation time and found that both annotation schemes perform similarly.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
321–334
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.30
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Robert Vacareanu, Enrique Noriega-Atala, Gus Hahn-Powell, Marco A. Valenzuela-Escarcega, and Mihai Surdeanu. 2024. Active Learning Design Choices for NER with Transformers. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 321–334, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Active Learning Design Choices for NER with Transformers (Vacareanu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.30.pdf