Abstract. Analysing textual responses to open-ended survey questions has been one of the challenging applications for NLP. Such unstructured text data is a rich data source of subjective opinions about a specific topic or entity; but it is not amenable to quick and comprehensive analysis. Survey coding is the process of categorizing such text responses using a pre-specified hierarchy of classes (often called a code-frame). In this paper, we identify the factors constraining the automation approaches to this problem and observe that a completely supervised learning approach is not feasible in practice. We then present details of our approach which uses multi-label text classification as a first step without requiring labeled training data. This is followed by the second step of active learning based verification of survey response categorization done in first step. This weak supervision using active learning helps us to optimize the human involvement as well as to adapt the process for different domains. Efficacy of our method is established using the high agreement with real-life, manually annotated benchmark data.
for responses to open-ended questions is REF .
Active Learning Based Weak Supervision for Textual Survey Response Classification
CICLing
Computer Science