cs.LGApr 25, 2026

An Analysis of Active Learning Algorithms using Real-World Crowd-sourced Text Annotations

Authors: Varun TotakuraAnkita SinghYushun DongShayok Chakraborty

Organizations: Department of Computer Science Florida State University Tallahassee, FL, USA

Abstract

Active learning algorithms automatically identify the most informative samples from large amounts of unlabeled data and tremendously reduce human annotation effort in inducing a machine learning model. In a conventional active learning setup, the labeling oracles are assumed to be infallible, that is, they always provide correct answers (in terms of class labels) to the queried unlabeled instances, which cannot be guaranteed in real-world applications. To this end, a body of research has focused on the development of active learning algorithms in the presence of imperfect / noisy oracles. Existing research on active learning with noisy oracles typically simulate the oracles using machine learning models; however, real-world situations are much more challenging, and using ML models to simulate the annotation patterns may not appropriately capture the nuances of real-world annotation challenges. In this research, we first collect annotations of text samples (from 3 benchmark text classification datasets) from crowd-sourced workers through a crowd-sourcing platform. We then conduct extensive empirical studies of 8 commonly used active learning techniques (in conjunction with deep neural networks) using the obtained annotations. Our analyses sheds light on the performance of these techniques under real-world challenges, where annotators can provide incorrect labels, and can also refuse to provide labels. We hope this research will provide valuable insights that will be useful for the deployment of deep active learning systems in real-world applications. The obtained annotations can be accessed at https://github.com/varuntotakura/al_rcta/.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Are Candidate Models Really Needed for Active Learning?

    May 14, 2026Harshini Mridula Mohan, Maanya Manjunath, Vipul Arya +2Active LearningConvolutional Neural Networks