Alex Ratner - Programmatically Building & Managing Training Data with Snorkel

One of the key bottlenecks in building machine learning systems is creating and managing the massive training datasets that today's models require. In this talk, I will describe our work on Snorkel (snorkel.org), an open-source framework for building and managing training datasets, and describe three key operators for letting users build and manipulate training datasets: labeling functions, for labeling unlabeled data; transformation functions, for expressing data augmentation strategies; and slicing functions, for partitioning and structuring training datasets.  These operators allow domain expert users to specify machine learning (ML) models entirely via noisy operators over training data, expressed as simple Python functions---or even via higher level NL or point-and-click interfaces---leading to applications that can be built in hours or days, rather than months or years, and that can be iteratively developed, modified, versioned, and audited. I will describe recent work on modeling the noise and imprecision inherent in these operators, and using these approaches to train ML models that solve real-world problems, including recent state-of-the-art results on benchmark tasks and real-world industry, government, and medical deployments.