We propose a new active learning (AL) method for text classification with
convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In AL, one selects the instances to be
manually labeled with the aim of maximizing model performance with minimal
effort. Neural models capitalize on word embeddings as representations
(features), tuning these to the task at hand. We argue that AL strategies for
multi-layered neural models should focus on selecting instances that most
affect the embedding space (i.e., induce discriminative word representations).
This is in contrast to traditional AL approaches (e.g., entropy-based
uncertainty sampling), which specify higher level objectives. We propose a
simple approach for sentence classification that selects instances containing
words whose embeddings are likely to be updated with the greatest magnitude,
thereby rapidly learning discriminative, task-specific embeddings. We extend
this approach to document classification by jointly considering: (1) the
expected changes to the constituent word representations; and (2) the model's
current overall uncertainty regarding the instance. The relative emphasis
placed on these criteria is governed by a stochastic process that favors
selecting instances likely to improve representations at the outset of
learning, and then shifts toward general uncertainty sampling as AL progresses.
Empirical results show that our method outperforms baseline AL approaches on
both sentence and document classification tasks. We also show that, as
expected, the method quickly learns discriminative word embeddings. To the best
of our knowledge, this is the first work on AL addressing neural models for
text classification.Comment: This paper got accepted by AAAI 201