Harnessing Organizational Knowledge for Machine Learning

One of the biggest bottlenecks in developing machine learning (ML) applications is the need for the large, labeled datasets used to train modern ML models. Creating these datasets involves the investment of significant time and expense, requiring annotators with the right expertise. Moreover, due to the evolution of real-world applications, labeled datasets often need to be thrown out or re-labeled.


In collaboration with Stanford and Brown University, we present "Snorkel Drybell: A Case Study in Deploying Weak Supervision at Industrial Scale," which explores how existing knowledge in an organization can be used as noisier, higher-level supervision—or, as it is often termed, weak supervision—to quickly label large training datasets. In this study, we use an experimental internal system, Snorkel Drybell, which adapts the open-source Snorkel framework to use diverse organizational knowledge resources—like internal models, ontologies, legacy rules, knowledge graphs and more—in order to generate training data for machine learning models at web scale. We find that this approach can match the efficacy of hand-labeling tens of thousands of data points, and reveals some core lessons about how training datasets for modern machine learning models can be created in practice.

Rather than labeling training data by hand, Snorkel DryBell enables writing labeling functions that label training data programmatically. In this work, we explored how these labeling functions can capture engineers' knowledge about how to use existing resources as heuristics for weak supervision. As an example, suppose our goal is to identify content related to celebrities. One can leverage an existing named-entity recognition (NER) model for this task by labeling any content that does not contain a person as not related to celebrities. This illustrates how existing knowledge resources (in this case, a trained model) can be combined with simple programmatic logic to label training data for a new model. Note also, importantly, that this labeling function returns None---i.e. abstains---in many cases, and thus only labels some small part of the data; our overall goal is to use these labels to train a modern machine learning model that can generalize to new data.

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