Design Choices in Crowdsourcing Discourse Relation Annotations: The Effect of Worker Selection and Training

Merel Scholman, Valentina Pyatkin, Frances Yung, Ido Dagan, Reut Tsarfaty, Vera Demberg


Abstract
Obtaining linguistic annotation from novice crowdworkers is far from trivial. A case in point is the annotation of discourse relations, which is a complicated task. Recent methods have obtained promising results by extracting relation labels from either discourse connectives (DCs) or question-answer (QA) pairs that participants provide. The current contribution studies the effect of worker selection and training on the agreement on implicit relation labels between workers and gold labels, for both the DC and the QA method. In Study 1, workers were not specifically selected or trained, and the results show that there is much room for improvement. Study 2 shows that a combination of selection and training does lead to improved results, but the method is cost- and time-intensive. Study 3 shows that a selection-only approach is a viable alternative; it results in annotations of comparable quality compared to annotations from trained participants. The results generalized over both the DC and QA method and therefore indicate that a selection-only approach could also be effective for other crowdsourced discourse annotation tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.231
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2148–2156
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.231
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Merel Scholman, Valentina Pyatkin, Frances Yung, Ido Dagan, Reut Tsarfaty, and Vera Demberg. 2022. Design Choices in Crowdsourcing Discourse Relation Annotations: The Effect of Worker Selection and Training. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2148–2156, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Design Choices in Crowdsourcing Discourse Relation Annotations: The Effect of Worker Selection and Training (Scholman et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.231.pdf