Corpus Considerations for Annotator Modeling and Scaling

Olufunke O. Sarumi, Béla Neuendorf, Joan Plepi, Lucie Flek, Jörg Schlötterer, Charles Welch


Abstract
Recent trends in natural language processing research and annotation tasks affirm a paradigm shift from the traditional reliance on a single ground truth to a focus on individual perspectives, particularly in subjective tasks. In scenarios where annotation tasks are meant to encompass diversity, models that solely rely on the majority class labels may inadvertently disregard valuable minority perspectives. This oversight could result in the omission of crucial information and, in a broader context, risk disrupting the balance within larger ecosystems. As the landscape of annotator modeling unfolds with diverse representation techniques, it becomes imperative to investigate their effectiveness with the fine-grained features of the datasets in view. This study systematically explores various annotator modeling techniques and compares their performance across seven corpora. From our findings, we show that the commonly used user token model consistently outperforms more complex models. We introduce a composite embedding approach and show distinct differences in which model performs best as a function of the agreement with a given dataset. Our findings shed light on the relationship between corpus statistics and annotator modeling performance, which informs future work on corpus construction and perspectivist NLP.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.59
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1029–1040
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.59
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.59
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Olufunke O. Sarumi, Béla Neuendorf, Joan Plepi, Lucie Flek, Jörg Schlötterer, and Charles Welch. 2024. Corpus Considerations for Annotator Modeling and Scaling. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1029–1040, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Corpus Considerations for Annotator Modeling and Scaling (Sarumi et al., NAACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.59.pdf