Human labeling of textual data can be very time-consuming and expensive, yet it is critical for the success of an automatic text classification system. In order to minimize human labeling efforts, we propose a novel active learning (AL) solution, that does not rely on existing sources of unlabeled data. It uses a small amount of labeled data as the core set for the synthesis of useful membership queries (MQs) - unlabeled instances synthesized by an algorithm for human labeling. Our solution uses modification operators, functions from the instance space to the instance space that change the input to some extent. We apply the operators on the core set, thus creating a set of new membership queries. Using this framework, we look at the instance space as a search space and apply search algorithms in order to create desirable MQs. We implement this framework in the textual domain. The implementation includes using methods such as WordNet and Word2vec, for replacing text fragments from a given sentence with semantically related ones. We test our framework on several text classification tasks and show improved classifier performance as more MQs are labeled and incorporated into the training set. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on membership queries in the textual domain.
Assume that we are trying to build a visual recognizer for a particular class of objects--chairs, for example--using existing induction methods. Assume the assistance of a human teacher who can label an image of an object as a positive or a negative example. As positive examples, we can obviously use images of real chairs. It is not clear, however, what types of objects we should use as negative examples. This is an example of a common problem where the concept we are trying to learn represents a small fraction of a large universe of instances. In this work we suggest learning with the help of near misses--negative examples that differ from the learned concept in only a small number of significant points, and we propose a framework for automatic generation of such examples. We show that generating near misses in the feature space is problematic in some domains, and propose a methodology for generating examples directly in the instance space using modification operators--functions over the instance space that produce new instances by slightly modifying existing ones. The generated instances are evaluated by mapping them into the feature space and measuring their utility using known active learning techniques. We apply the proposed framework to the task of learning visual concepts from range images.