Incorporating Item Response Theory (IRT) into NLP tasks can provide valuable information about model performance and behavior. Traditionally, IRT models are learned using human response pattern (RP) data, presenting a significant bottleneck for large data sets like those required for training deep neural networks (DNNs). In this work we propose learning IRT models using RPs generated from artificial crowds of DNN models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of learning IRT models using DNN-generated data through quantitative and qualitative analyses for two NLP tasks. Parameters learned from human and machine RPs for natural language inference and sentiment analysis exhibit medium to large positive correlations. We demonstrate a use-case for latent difficulty item parameters, namely training set filtering, and show that using difficulty to sample training data outperforms baseline methods. Finally, we highlight cases where human expectation about item difficulty does not match difficulty as estimated from the machine RPs.
There are several other areas of study regarding how best to use training data that are related to this work. Re-weighting or re-ordering training examples is a well-studied and related area of supervised learning. Often examples are re-weighted according to some notion of difficulty, or model uncertainty @cite_24 . In particular, the internal uncertainty of the model is used as the basis for selecting how training examples are weighted. However, model uncertainty depends upon the original training data the model was trained on, while here we use an external measure of uncertainty.
@cite_24
2609701267 2963476860 189742998 2311233238
Self-paced learning and hard example mining re-weight training instances to improve learning accuracy. This paper presents two improved alternatives based on lightweight estimates of sample uncertainty in stochastic gradient descent (SGD): the variance in predicted probability of the correct class across iterations of mini-batch SGD, and the proximity of the correct class probability to the decision threshold. Extensive experimental results on six datasets show that our methods reliably improve accuracy in various network architectures, including additional gains on top of other popular training techniques, such as residual learning, momentum, ADAM, batch normalization, dropout, and distillation. Self-paced learning and hard example mining re-weight training instances to improve learning accuracy. This paper presents two improved alternatives based on lightweight estimates of sample uncertainty in stochastic gradient descent (SGD): the variance in predicted probability of the correct class across iterations of mini-batch SGD, and the proximity of the correct class probability to the decision threshold. Extensive experimental results on six datasets show that our methods reliably improve accuracy in various network architectures, including additional gains on top of other popular training techniques, such as residual learning, momentum, ADAM, batch normalization, dropout, and distillation. A common assumption in supervised learning is that the input points in the training set follow the same probability distribution as the input points that will be given in the future test phase. However, this assumption is not satisfied, for example, when the outside of the training region is extrapolated. The situation where the training input points and test input points follow different distributions while the conditional distribution of output values given input points is unchanged is called the covariate shift. Under the covariate shift, standard model selection techniques such as cross validation do not work as desired since its unbiasedness is no longer maintained. In this paper, we propose a new method called importance weighted cross validation (IWCV), for which we prove its unbiasedness even under the covariate shift. The IWCV procedure is the only one that can be applied for unbiased classification under covariate shift, whereas alternatives to IWCV exist for regression. The usefulness of our proposed method is illustrated by simulations, and furthermore demonstrated in the brain-computer interface, where strong non-stationarity effects can be seen between training and test sessions. In supervised learning, it is typically assumed that the labeled training data comes from the same distribution as the test data to which the system will be applied. In recent years, machine-learning researchers have investigated methods to handle mismatch between the training and test domains, with the goal of building a classifier using the labeled data in the old domain that will perform well on the test data in the new domain. This problem is called domain adaptation or transfer learning, and it is a common scenario in speech processing applications. Labeled training data are often produced by an expensive hand-annotation process, and may consist of only one or two annotated corpora which are used to train virtually all systems regardless of the target domain. Often little or no labeled data is available for the new domain. In this work, we review the statistical machine learning literature dealing with the problem of “domain adaptation” or “transfer learning”. We focus on unsupervised domain adaptation methods, as opposed to model adaptation or supervised adaptation in which some labeled data is available from the test distribution. We consider four main classes of approaches in the literature: instance weighting for covariate shift; selflabeling methods; changes in feature representation; and cluster-based learning. Covariate shift methods re-weight training samples in the old domain to try to match the new domain, putting more weight on samples in populous regions in the new domain. Self-labeling methods incorporate unlabeled target domain examples into the training algorithm by making an initial guess about their labels and then iteratively refining the guesses or labeling more examples. Feature representation approaches try to find a new feature representation of the data, either to make the new and old distributions look similar, or to find an abstracted representation for domain-specific features. Cluster-based methods rely on the assumption that samples connected by high-density paths are likely to have the same label. Domain adaptation is a large area of research, with related work under several frameworks (and several names). A limited review from March 2008 can be found in [1], and one from Oct 2010 can be found in [2]. A recent book [3] investigates train test distribution mismatch in machine learning (particularly focused on covariate shift.) Some of the organization here roughly follows that in [1].