Detecting disclosures of individuals’ employment status on social media can provide valuable information to match job seekers with suitable vacancies, offer social protection, or measure labor market flows. However, identifying such personal disclosures is a challenging task due to their rarity in a sea of social media content and the variety of linguistic forms used to describe them. Here, we examine three Active Learning (AL) strategies in real-world settings of extreme class imbalance, and identify five types of disclosures about individuals’ employment status (e.g. job loss) in three languages using BERT-based classification models. Our findings show that, even under extreme imbalance settings, a small number of AL iterations is sufficient to obtain large and significant gains in precision, recall, and diversity of results compared to a supervised baseline with the same number of labels. We also find that no AL strategy consistently outperforms the rest. Qualitative analysis suggests that AL helps focus the attention mechanism of BERT on core terms and adjust the boundaries of semantic expansion, highlighting the importance of interpretable models to provide greater control and visibility into this dynamic learning process.

Common people often experience difficulties in accessing relevant, correct, accurate and understandable health information online. Developing search techniques that aid these information needs is challenging. In this paper we present the datasets created by CLEF eHealth Lab from 2013-2015 for evaluation of search solutions to support common people finding health information online. Specifically, the CLEF eHealth information retrieval (IR) task of this Lab has provided the research community with benchmarks for evaluating consumer-centered health information retrieval, thus fostering research and development aimed to address this challenging problem. Given consumer queries, the goal of the task is to retrieve relevant documents from the provided collection of web pages. The shared datasets provide a large health web crawl, queries representing people’s real world information needs, and relevance assessment judgements for the queries.