Date: Wednesday, November 12 2008, 6:30 PM - Social, 7:00 PM Talk
Location:NASA, Mountain View, Eagle Room, Building 943, NASA Campus, Mountain View directions
Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year.
Abstract:
Human annotation is crucial for many machine learning tasks but can be
expensive and time-consuming. We explore the use of Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk web service, a significantly cheaper and faster method
for collecting annotations from a broad base of paid non-expert
contributors over the Web. We investigate five tasks in the field of
natural language processing: affect recognition, word similarity,
recognizing textual entailment, event temporal ordering, and word
sense disambiguation. For all five, we show high agreement between
Mechanical Turk non-expert annotations and existing gold standard
labels provided by expert labelers. For the task of affect
recognition, we also show that using non-expert labels for training
machine learning algorithms can be as effective as using gold standard
annotations from experts. We propose a technique for bias correction that significantly
improves annotation quality on two tasks. We conclude that many large
labeling tasks can be effectively designed and carried out in this
method at a fraction of the usual expense. A summary of this work may
be found online at:
http://blog.doloreslabs.com/2008/09/amt-fast-cheap-good-machine-learning/
Bio:
Rion Snow is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Stanford
University, advised by Professors Andrew Ng and Dan Jurafsky. Rion
works in the intersection of machine learning and natural language
processing, with a focus in computational semantics. He leads the
Stanford Wordnet Project, which aims at learning large-scale semantic
networks automatically from natural text. His work on automatically
inferring semantic taxonomies received the Best Paper Award at the
2006 conference for the Association of Computational Linguistics