Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children’s mindreading ability

Venelin Kovatchev, Phillip Smith, Mark Lee, Rory Devine


Abstract
In this paper we implement and compare 7 different data augmentation strategies for the task of automatic scoring of children’s ability to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and desires (or “mindreading”). We recruit in-domain experts to re-annotate augmented samples and determine to what extent each strategy preserves the original rating. We also carry out multiple experiments to measure how much each augmentation strategy improves the performance of automatic scoring systems. To determine the capabilities of automatic systems to generalize to unseen data, we create UK-MIND-20 - a new corpus of children’s performance on tests of mindreading, consisting of 10,320 question-answer pairs. We obtain a new state-of-the-art performance on the MIND-CA corpus, improving macro-F1-score by 6 points. Results indicate that both the number of training examples and the quality of the augmentation strategies affect the performance of the systems. The task-specific augmentations generally outperform task-agnostic augmentations. Automatic augmentations based on vectors (GloVe, FastText) perform the worst. We find that systems trained on MIND-CA generalize well to UK-MIND-20. We demonstrate that data augmentation strategies also improve the performance on unseen data.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.96
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1196–1206
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.96
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.96
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Venelin Kovatchev, Phillip Smith, Mark Lee, and Rory Devine. 2021. Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children’s mindreading ability. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1196–1206, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children’s mindreading ability (Kovatchev et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.96.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.96.mp4