Handling Noisy Labels for Robustly Learning from Self-Training Data for Low-Resource Sequence Labeling
This addresses the challenge of noisy labels in self-training for low-resource NLP scenarios, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of unreliable annotations in self-training for low-resource sequence labeling by proposing a method that explicitly models clean and noisy labels separately, leading to more robust performance on Chunking and NER tasks compared to baselines.
In this paper, we address the problem of effectively self-training neural networks in a low-resource setting. Self-training is frequently used to automatically increase the amount of training data. However, in a low-resource scenario, it is less effective due to unreliable annotations created using self-labeling of unlabeled data. We propose to combine self-training with noise handling on the self-labeled data. Directly estimating noise on the combined clean training set and self-labeled data can lead to corruption of the clean data and hence, performs worse. Thus, we propose the Clean and Noisy Label Neural Network which trains on clean and noisy self-labeled data simultaneously by explicitly modelling clean and noisy labels separately. In our experiments on Chunking and NER, this approach performs more robustly than the baselines. Complementary to this explicit approach, noise can also be handled implicitly with the help of an auxiliary learning task. To such a complementary approach, our method is more beneficial than other baseline methods and together provides the best performance overall.