Handling Noisy Labels for Robustly Learning from Self-Training Data for Low-Resource Sequence Labeling

Debjit Paul, Mittul Singh, Michael A. Hedderich, Dietrich Klakow


Abstract
In this paper, we address the problem of effectively self-training neural networks in a low-resource setting. Self-training is frequently used to automatically increase the amount of training data. However, in a low-resource scenario, it is less effective due to unreliable annotations created using self-labeling of unlabeled data. We propose to combine self-training with noise handling on the self-labeled data. Directly estimating noise on the combined clean training set and self-labeled data can lead to corruption of the clean data and hence, performs worse. Thus, we propose the Clean and Noisy Label Neural Network which trains on clean and noisy self-labeled data simultaneously by explicitly modelling clean and noisy labels separately. In our experiments on Chunking and NER, this approach performs more robustly than the baselines. Complementary to this explicit approach, noise can also be handled implicitly with the help of an auxiliary learning task. To such a complementary approach, our method is more beneficial than other baseline methods and together provides the best performance overall.
Anthology ID:
N19-3005
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Sudipta Kar, Farah Nadeem, Laura Burdick, Greg Durrett, Na-Rae Han
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29–34
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-3005
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-3005
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Debjit Paul, Mittul Singh, Michael A. Hedderich, and Dietrich Klakow. 2019. Handling Noisy Labels for Robustly Learning from Self-Training Data for Low-Resource Sequence Labeling. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 29–34, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Handling Noisy Labels for Robustly Learning from Self-Training Data for Low-Resource Sequence Labeling (Paul et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-3005.pdf
Data
Penn Treebank