This paper presents the Source-Free Domain Adaptation shared task held within SemEval-2021. The aim of the task was to explore adaptation of machine-learning models in the face of data sharing constraints. Specifically, we consider the scenario where
annotations exist for a domain but cannot be shared. Instead, participants are provided with models trained on that (source) data. Participants also receive some labeled data from a new (development) domain on which to explore domain adaptation algorithms. Participants are then tested on data representing a new (target) domain. We explored this scenario with two different semantic tasks: negation detection (a text classification task) and time expression recognition (a sequence tagging task).
Domain adaptation assumes that samples from source and target domains are freely accessible during a training phase. However, such assumption is rarely plausible in the real-world and may causes data-privacy issues, especially when the label of the s
ource domain can be a sensitive attribute as an identifier. SemEval-2021 task 10 focuses on these issues. We participate in the task and propose novel frameworks based on self-training method. In our systems, two different frameworks are designed to solve text classification and sequence labeling. These approaches are tested to be effective which ranks the third among all system in subtask A, and ranks the first among all system in subtask B.
