How we can use Baal for NER using huggingface

[ayushkm2799]

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[Dref360]

Hello,

I'm not super familiar with NER, but Baal should be able to handle it easily.

Here is a script that load a NER model and outputs prediction. We use MC-Dropout to get the predictions and BALD to estimate the uncertainty.

Note that to get the uncertainty, we need to swap the axes to have the probabilities on the axis 1. [?, PROBS, Sequence, MC-Dropout].

from datasets import load_dataset
from transformers import pipeline

from baal.active.heuristics import BALD
from baal.bayesian.dropout import patch_module
from baal.transformers_trainer_wrapper import BaalTransformersTrainer

dataset = load_dataset("conll2003")

pipeline = pipeline('ner', model='issifuamajeed/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-ner')
tokenizer = pipeline.tokenizer

# Apply MC-Dropout
model = patch_module(pipeline.model)
trainer = BaalTransformersTrainer(model=model)


def preprocess(example):
    results = tokenizer(" ".join(example['tokens']), max_length=50,
                        truncation=True, padding='max_length')
    return results


tokenized_dataset = dataset.map(preprocess)

# Shape [Batch_size, Num-Tokens, Probabilities, Iterations]
predictions = trainer.predict_on_dataset(tokenized_dataset['test'], iterations=10)

# Predictions with Class first [batch_size, Probabilities, Num Tokens, Iteration]
next_to_label = BALD(reduction='sum')(predictions.swapaxes(1, 2))
uncertainties = BALD().get_uncertainties(predictions.swapaxes(1, 2))

I hope this helps!

[ayushkm2799]

hi @Dref360,

So next_to_label contain a list of indexes, So, these are in sorted order i.e, if list contain [4,5,1,2] means 4 have highest uncertainty?

How we can use this in ActiveLearningLoop?

[Dref360]

Hello,

1. Yes those would have the highest uncertainty.

I had to do some modifications to Baal to make ActiveLearningLoop work on NER. I opened #263 to fix that.

I edited my code to showcase a complete active learning experiment on NER. If you pull the branch and run this gist, it should work as expected.

[ayushkm2799]

Hii @Dref360

for _ in range(2):
    print(f"Active learning: labelled={al_dataset.n_labelled} unlabelled={al_dataset.n_unlabelled}")
    trainer.train()
    trainer.load_state_dict(init_weights)
    trainer.lr_scheduler = None
    trainer.evaluate()
    loop.step()

If we add this Piece of code does it means we We are training the model on 100 sample of label data again and again and now we are adding 100 data from unlabelled data? or it means in first iteration we are adding 100 sample of unlabel data to training and in next step model will train on 200 dataset and now will predict next 100 dataset?

[Dref360]

Oh I made a mistake in the Gist, now updated. We first load the initial weights before training.

for _ in range(2):
    trainer.load_state_dict(init_weights)
    print(f"Active learning: labelled={al_dataset.n_labelled} unlabelled={al_dataset.n_unlabelled}")
    trainer.train()
    trainer.lr_scheduler = None
    trainer.evaluate()
    loop.step()

For your question:

The first step will train on 100 and label 100 more. Then we will train on 200, label 100, etc.