Is More Data Better? Re-thinking the Importance of Efficiency in Abusive Language Detection with Transformers-Based Active Learning

Annotating abusive language is expensive, logistically complex and creates a risk of psychological harm. However, most machine learning research has prioritized maximizing effectiveness (i.e., F1 or accuracy score) rather than data efficiency (i.e., minimizing the amount of data that is annotated). In this paper, we use simulated experiments over two datasets at varying percentages of abuse to demonstrate that transformers-based active learning is a promising approach to substantially raise efficiency whilst still maintaining high effectiveness, especially when abusive content is a smaller percentage of the dataset. This approach requires a fraction of labeled data to reach performance equivalent to training over the full dataset.