Knowledge transfer for multi-labeler active learning

Abstract

In this paper, we address multi-labeler active learning, where data labels can be acquired from multiple labelers with various levels of expertise. Because obtaining labels for data instances can be very costly and time-consuming, it is highly desirable to model each labeler's expertise and only to query an instance's label from the labeler with the best expertise. However, in an active learning scenario, it is very difficult to accurately model labelers' expertise, because the quantity of instances labeled by all participating labelers is rather small. To solve this problem, we propose a new probabilistic model that transfers knowledge from a rich set of labeled instances in some auxiliary domains to help model labelers' expertise for active learning. Based on this model, we present an active learning algorithm to simultaneously select the most informative instance and its most reliable labeler to query. Experiments demonstrate that transferring knowledge across related domains can help select the labeler with the best expertise and thus significantly boost the active learning performance. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.