NoisyAG-News: A Benchmark for Addressing Instance-Dependent Noise in Text Classification

Existing research on learning with noisy labels predominantly focuses on synthetic label noise. Although synthetic noise possesses well-defined structural properties, it often fails to accurately replicate real-world noise patterns. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to construct generalizable and controllable instance-dependent noise datasets for image classification, significantly advancing the development of noise-robust learning in this area. However, studies on noisy label learning for text classification remain scarce. To better understand label noise in real-world text classification settings, we constructed the benchmark dataset NoisyAG-News through manual annotation. Initially, we analyzed the annotated data to gather observations about real-world noise. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated that real-world noisy labels adhere to instance-dependent patterns. Subsequently, we conducted comprehensive learning experiments on NoisyAG-News and its corresponding synthetic noise datasets using pre-trained language models and noise-handling techniques. Our findings reveal that while pre-trained models are resilient to synthetic noise, they struggle against instance-dependent noise, with samples of varying confusion levels showing inconsistent performance during training and testing. These real-world noise patterns pose new, significant challenges, prompting a reevaluation of noisy label handling methods. We hope that NoisyAG-News will facilitate the development and evaluation of future solutions for learning with noisy labels.