Deep Active Learning for Named Entity Recognition

Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data

Task Selection for Bandit-Based Task Assignment in Heterogeneous Crowdsourcing

Task selection (picking an appropriate labeling task) and worker selection (assigning the labeling task to a suitable worker) are two major challenges in task assignment for crowdsourcing. Recently, worker selection has been successfully addressed by the bandit-based task assignment (BBTA) method, while task selection has not been thoroughly investigated yet. In this paper, we experimentally compare several task selection strategies borrowed from active learning literature, and show that the least confidence strategy significantly improves the performance of task assignment in crowdsourcing.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1507.0580

Learning Active Learning from Data

In this paper, we suggest a novel data-driven approach to active learning (AL). The key idea is to train a regressor that predicts the expected error reduction for a candidate sample in a particular learning state. By formulating the query selection procedure as a regression problem we are not restricted to working with existing AL heuristics; instead, we learn strategies based on experience from previous AL outcomes. We show that a strategy can be learnt either from simple synthetic 2D datasets or from a subset of domain-specific data. Our method yields strategies that work well on real data from a wide range of domains

Expected exponential loss for gaze-based video and volume ground truth annotation

Many recent machine learning approaches used in medical imaging are highly reliant on large amounts of image and ground truth data. In the context of object segmentation, pixel-wise annotations are extremely expensive to collect, especially in video and 3D volumes. To reduce this annotation burden, we propose a novel framework to allow annotators to simply observe the object to segment and record where they have looked at with a \$200 eye gaze tracker. Our method then estimates pixel-wise probabilities for the presence of the object throughout the sequence from which we train a classifier in semi-supervised setting using a novel Expected Exponential loss function. We show that our framework provides superior performances on a wide range of medical image settings compared to existing strategies and that our method can be combined with current crowd-sourcing paradigms as well.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figues, MICCAI 2017 - LABELS Worksho