Multi-View Knowledge Distillation from Crowd Annotations for Out-of-Domain Generalization

Selecting an effective training signal for tasks in natural language processing is difficult: collecting expert annotations is expensive, and crowd-sourced annotations may not be reliable. At the same time, recent work in machine learning has demonstrated that learning from soft-labels acquired from crowd annotations can be effective, especially when there is distribution shift in the test set. However, the best method for acquiring these soft labels is inconsistent across tasks. This paper proposes new methods for acquiring soft-labels from crowd-annotations by aggregating the distributions produced by existing methods. In particular, we propose to find a distribution over classes by learning from multiple-views of crowd annotations via temperature scaling and finding the Jensen-Shannon centroid of their distributions. We demonstrate that using these aggregation methods leads to best or near-best performance across four NLP tasks on out-of-domain test sets, mitigating fluctuations in performance when using the constituent methods on their own. Additionally, these methods result in best or near-best uncertainty estimation across tasks. We argue that aggregating different views of crowd-annotations as soft-labels is an effective way to ensure performance which is as good or better than the best individual view, which is useful given the inconsistency in performance of the individual methods.