Does Putting a Linguist in the Loop Improve NLU Data Collection?

Alicia Parrish, William Huang, Omar Agha, Soo-Hwan Lee, Nikita Nangia, Alexia Warstadt, Karmanya Aggarwal, Emily Allaway, Tal Linzen, Samuel R. Bowman


Abstract
Many crowdsourced NLP datasets contain systematic artifacts that are identified only after data collection is complete. Earlier identification of these issues should make it easier to create high-quality training and evaluation data. We attempt this by evaluating protocols in which expert linguists work ‘in the loop’ during data collection to identify and address these issues by adjusting task instructions and incentives. Using natural language inference as a test case, we compare three data collection protocols: (i) a baseline protocol with no linguist involvement, (ii) a linguist-in-the-loop intervention with iteratively-updated constraints on the writing task, and (iii) an extension that adds direct interaction between linguists and crowdworkers via a chatroom. We find that linguist involvement does not lead to increased accuracy on out-of-domain test sets compared to baseline, and adding a chatroom has no effect on the data. Linguist involvement does, however, lead to more challenging evaluation data and higher accuracy on some challenge sets, demonstrating the benefits of integrating expert analysis during data collection.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.421
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4886–4901
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.421
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.421
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alicia Parrish, William Huang, Omar Agha, Soo-Hwan Lee, Nikita Nangia, Alexia Warstadt, Karmanya Aggarwal, Emily Allaway, Tal Linzen, and Samuel R. Bowman. 2021. Does Putting a Linguist in the Loop Improve NLU Data Collection?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4886–4901, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Does Putting a Linguist in the Loop Improve NLU Data Collection? (Parrish et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.421.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.421.mp4
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