Active learning, a widely adopted technique for enhancing machine learning models in text and image classification tasks with limited annotation resources, has received relatively little attention in the domain of Named Entity Recognition (NER). The challenge of data imbalance in NER has hindered the effectiveness of active learning, as sequence labellers lack sufficient learning signals. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel re-weighting-based active learning strategy that assigns dynamic smoothing weights to individual tokens. This adaptable strategy is compatible with various token-level acquisition functions and contributes to the development of robust active learners. Experimental results on multiple corpora demonstrate the substantial performance improvement achieved by incorporating our re-weighting strategy into existing acquisition functions, validating its practical efficacy. We will release our implementation upon the publication of this paper.

Since mobile devices have feature-rich configurations and provide diverse functions, the use of mobile devices combined with the language resources of cloud environments is high promising for achieving a wide range communication that goes beyond the current language barrier. However, there are mismatches between using resources of mobile devices and services in the cloud such as the different communication protocol and different input and output methods. In this paper, we propose a language service infrastructure for mobile environments to combine these services. The proposed language service infrastructure allows users to use and mashup existing language resources on both cloud environments and their mobile devices. Furthermore, it allows users to flexibly use services in the cloud or services on mobile devices in their composite service without implementing several different composite services that have the same functionality. A case study of Mobile Shopping Translation System using both a service in the cloud (translation service) and services on mobile devices (Bluetooth low energy (BLE) service and text-to-speech service) is introduced.