Menglin Jia


2021

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When in Doubt: Improving Classification Performance with Alternating Normalization
Menglin Jia | Austin Reiter | Ser-Nam Lim | Yoav Artzi | Claire Cardie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

We introduce Classification with Alternating Normalization (CAN), a non-parametric post-processing step for classification. CAN improves classification accuracy for challenging examples by re-adjusting their predicted class probability distribution using the predicted class distributions of high-confidence validation examples. CAN is easily applicable to any probabilistic classifier, with minimal computation overhead. We analyze the properties of CAN using simulated experiments, and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness across a diverse set of classification tasks.