On the Importance of Adaptive Data Collection for Extremely Imbalanced Pairwise Tasks

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020 · Stephen Mussmann, Robin Jia, Percy Liang ·

Many pairwise classification tasks, such as paraphrase detection and open-domain question answering, naturally have extreme label imbalance (e.g., $99.99\%$ of examples are negatives). In contrast, many recent datasets heuristically choose examples to ensure label balance. We show that these heuristics lead to trained models that generalize poorly: State-of-the art models trained on QQP and WikiQA each have only $2.4\%$ average precision when evaluated on realistically imbalanced test data. We instead collect training data with active learning, using a BERT-based embedding model to efficiently retrieve uncertain points from a very large pool of unlabeled utterance pairs. By creating balanced training data with more informative negative examples, active learning greatly improves average precision to $32.5\%$ on QQP and $20.1\%$ on WikiQA.