## 29 May 2007

### Quality vs. quantity in data annotation

I'm in the process of annotating some data (along with some students---thanks guys!). While this data isn't really in the context of an NLP application, the annotation process made me think of the following issue. I can annotate a lot more data if I'm less careful. Okay, so this is obvious. But it's something I hadn't really specifically thought of before.

So here's the issue. I have some fixed amount of time in which to annotate data (or some fixed amount of dollars). In this time, I can annotate N data points with a noise-rate of eta_N. Presumably eta_N approaches one half (for a binary task) as N increases. In other words, as N increases, (1-2 eta_N) approaches zero. A standard result in PAC learning states that a lower bound on the number of examples required to achieve 1-epsilon accuracy with probability 1-delta with a noise rate of eta_N when the VC-dimension is h is (h+log(1/delta))/(epsilon (1-2 eta)^2)).

This gives us some insight into the problem. This says that it is worth labeling more data (with higher noise) only if 1/(1-2 eta_N)^2 increases more slowly than N. So if we can label twice as much data and have the noise of this annotation increase by less than a factor of 0.15, then we're doing well. (Well in the sense that we can keep the bound the same an shrink either \epsilon or delta.)

So how does this hold up in practice? Well, it's hard to tell exactly for real problems because running such experiments would be quite time-consuming. So here's a simulation. We have a binary classification problem with 100 features. The weight vector is random; the first 50 dimensions are Nor(0,0.2); the next 35 are Nor(0,5); the final 15 are Nor(m,1) where m is the weight of the current feature id minus 35 (feature correlation). We vary the number of training examples and the error rate. We always generate equal number of positive and negative points. We train a logistic regression model with hyperparameters tuned on 1024 (noisy) dev points and evaluate on 1024 non-noisy test points. We do this ten times for each setting and average the results. Here's a picture of accuracy as a function of data set size and noise rate:

And here's the table of results:

N\eta      0   0.01   0.02   0.05    0.1    0.2   16  0.341  0.340  0.351  0.366  0.380  0.420   32  0.283  0.276  0.295  0.307  0.327  0.363   64  0.215  0.221  0.227  0.247  0.266  0.324  128  0.141  0.148  0.164  0.194  0.223  0.272  256  0.084  0.099  0.100  0.136  0.165  0.214  512  0.038  0.061  0.065  0.087  0.113  0.164 1024  0.023  0.034  0.044  0.059  0.079  0.123

The general trend here seems to be that if you don't have much data (N<=256), then it's almost always better to get more data at a much higher error rate (0.1 or 0.2 versus 0.0). Once you have a reasonable amount of data, then it starts paying to be more noise-free. Eg., 256 examples with 0.05 noise is just about as good as 1024 examples with 0.2 noise. This roughly concurs with the theorem (at least in terms of the trends).

I think the take-home message that's perhaps worth keeping in mind is the following. If we only have a little time/money for annotation, we should probably annotate more data at a higher noise rate. Once we start getting more money, we should simultaneously be more careful and add more data, but not let one dominate the other.

Fernando Pereira said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Fernando Pereira said...

Possibly relevant paper: Learning from Data of Variable Quality. K. Crammer, M. Kearns, and J. Wortman. NIPS 2005

oren said...

but on the practical side - can you controll the noise level? relaxing the annotation guidlines or telling the annotators that quantity is preferable might create a way too much noise. the problem is even harder for soft classification that is relevant to many nlp experiments.

fernando, thanks for the ref. it seems a great paper that was just added to my growing to-read list

Bob Carpenter said...

Nice analysis.

It'd seem the next question here would be how to best use a pool of annotators. Theoretically, you could make assumptions about the correlations of errors and subsequent need for adjudication.

I'm guessing that like every other task of this kind, there's an enormous interpersonal variation in the speed/quality relation and offset that swamps just about every other concern. A hierarchical model might make sense here.

In the end, you also have to make assumptions about the highly non-linear relationship between time and quality. This'd actually have to be measured if you wanted to optimize production from your annotation farm.

It makes a big difference on speed/accuracy if users can just ignore a very hard case. When I was annotating for stemming and call routing, this was a serious concern, as some of the cases were simply inscrutable.

And then there's all the interaction with active learning concerns, which themselves interact with evaluation (0/1 vs. log prob). My guess is that active learning probably picks harder problems in general than random selection.

Next up, there's learn-a-little, tag-a-little, and its effect on both accuracy (it'd seem natural that it'd induce some bias in errors), and time. Of course, there's the stage of training which interacts with all of this.

If you're looking at overall time, I think there are huge improvements to be made at the GUI level. My current NE setup, which we're about to release, lets me chunk bibliographic references into types (e.g. author, title, journal, year) at 1000 tokens/second. I can do newswire into person/location/organization more than twice that fast. You can drive it quickly using only a keyboard, in contrast to standard approaches based on text editors. It took me about a week to build the whole thing, including all the corpus management.

Bob Carpenter said...

Correction -- that was 1000 tokens/hour for entity tagging by hand in our new interface, not 1000 tokens/second.

florian laws said...

bob:
there is a paper that suggests that active learing does indeed select harder examples for the human annotator:
Investigating the Effects of Selective Sampling on the Annotation Task. B. Hachey and B. Alex and M. Becker. Proceedings of CoNLL 2005

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