Reproducibility and Automation of the Appraisal Taxonomy

Pradeesh Parameswaran, Andrew Trotman, Veronica Liesaputra, David Eyers


Abstract
There is a lack of reproducibility in results from experiments that apply the Appraisal taxonomy. Appraisal is widely used by linguists to study how people judge things or people. Automating Appraisal could be beneficial for use cases such as moderating online comments. Past work in Appraisal annotation has been descriptive in nature and, the lack of publicly available data sets hinders the progress of automation. In this work, we are interested in two things; first, measuring the performance of automated approaches to Appraisal classification in the publicly available Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) Shared Task Challenge data set. Second, we are interested in reproducing the annotation of the ALTA data set. Four additional annotators, each with a different linguistics background, were employed to re-annotate the data set. Our results show a poor level of agreement at more detailed Appraisal categories (Fleiss Kappa = 0.059) and a fair level of agreement (Kappa = 0.372) at coarse-level categories. We find similar results when using automated approaches that are available publicly. Our empirical evidence suggests that at present, automating classification is practical only when considering coarse-level categories of the taxonomy.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.328
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3731–3740
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.328
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pradeesh Parameswaran, Andrew Trotman, Veronica Liesaputra, and David Eyers. 2022. Reproducibility and Automation of the Appraisal Taxonomy. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3731–3740, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reproducibility and Automation of the Appraisal Taxonomy (Parameswaran et al., COLING 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.328.pdf