An Interactive Multi-Label Consensus Labeling Model for Multiple Labeler Judgments

Multi-label classification is crucial to several practical applications including document categorization, video tagging, targeted advertising etc. Training a multi-label classifier requires a large amount of labeled data which is often unavailable or scarce. Labeled data is then acquired by consulting multiple labelers---both human and machine. Inspired by ensemble methods, our premise is that labels inferred with high consensus among labelers, might be closer to the ground truth. We propose strategies based on interaction and active learning to obtain higher quality labels that potentially lead to greater consensus. We propose a novel formulation that aims to collectively optimize the cost of labeling, labeler reliability, label-label correlation and inter-labeler consensus. Evaluation on data labeled by multiple labelers (both human and machine) shows that our consensus output is closer to the ground truth when compared to the "majority" baseline. We present illustrative cases where it even improves over the existing ground truth. We also present active learning strategies to leverage our consensus model in interactive learning settings. Experiments on several real-world datasets (publicly available) demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in achieving promising classification results with fewer labeled data.