Multiclass learning from multiple uncertain annotations

Abstract

Annotating a dataset is one of the major bottlenecks in supervised learning tasks, as it can be expensive and time-consuming. Instead, with the development of crowdsourcing services, it has become easy and fast to collect labels from multiple annotators. Our contribution in this paper is to propose a Bayesian probabilistic approach integrating annotator's uncertainty in the task of learning from multiple noisy annotators (annotators who generate errors). Furthermore, unlike previous work, our proposed approach is directly formulated to handle categorical labels. This is an important point as real-world datasets often have multiple classes available. Extensive experiments on datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach against previous efficient algorithms. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.