English

ULF: Unsupervised Labeling Function Correction using Cross-Validation for Weak Supervision

Machine Learning 2024-01-05 v4

Abstract

A cost-effective alternative to manual data labeling is weak supervision (WS), where data samples are automatically annotated using a predefined set of labeling functions (LFs), rule-based mechanisms that generate artificial labels for the associated classes. In this work, we investigate noise reduction techniques for WS based on the principle of k-fold cross-validation. We introduce a new algorithm ULF for Unsupervised Labeling Function correction, which denoises WS data by leveraging models trained on all but some LFs to identify and correct biases specific to the held-out LFs. Specifically, ULF refines the allocation of LFs to classes by re-estimating this assignment on highly reliable cross-validated samples. Evaluation on multiple datasets confirms ULF's effectiveness in enhancing WS learning without the need for manual labeling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.06863,
  title  = {ULF: Unsupervised Labeling Function Correction using Cross-Validation for Weak Supervision},
  author = {Anastasiia Sedova and Benjamin Roth},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.06863},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

EMNLP'23