ALE: A Simulation-Based Active Learning Evaluation Framework for the Parameter-Driven Comparison of Query Strategies for NLP
This work addresses the problem of empirical strategy selection for practitioners in NLP, though it is incremental as it builds on existing active learning methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of selecting active learning strategies in NLP by introducing the ALE framework, which enables reproducible and fair comparisons of strategies through parameter-driven simulations, helping practitioners reduce annotation costs.
Supervised machine learning and deep learning require a large amount of labeled data, which data scientists obtain in a manual, and time-consuming annotation process. To mitigate this challenge, Active Learning (AL) proposes promising data points to annotators they annotate next instead of a subsequent or random sample. This method is supposed to save annotation effort while maintaining model performance. However, practitioners face many AL strategies for different tasks and need an empirical basis to choose between them. Surveys categorize AL strategies into taxonomies without performance indications. Presentations of novel AL strategies compare the performance to a small subset of strategies. Our contribution addresses the empirical basis by introducing a reproducible active learning evaluation (ALE) framework for the comparative evaluation of AL strategies in NLP. The framework allows the implementation of AL strategies with low effort and a fair data-driven comparison through defining and tracking experiment parameters (e.g., initial dataset size, number of data points per query step, and the budget). ALE helps practitioners to make more informed decisions, and researchers can focus on developing new, effective AL strategies and deriving best practices for specific use cases. With best practices, practitioners can lower their annotation costs. We present a case study to illustrate how to use the framework.