RaFoLa: A Rationale-Annotated Corpus for Detecting Indicators of Forced Labour

Erick Mendez Guzman, Viktor Schlegel, Riza Batista-Navarro


Abstract
Forced labour is the most common type of modern slavery, and it is increasingly gaining the attention of the research and social community. Recent studies suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) holds immense potential for augmenting anti-slavery action. However, AI tools need to be developed transparently in cooperation with different stakeholders. Such tools are contingent on the availability and access to domain-specific data, which are scarce due to the near-invisible nature of forced labour. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first openly accessible English corpus annotated for multi-class and multi-label forced labour detection. The corpus consists of 989 news articles retrieved from specialised data sources and annotated according to risk indicators defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Each news article was annotated for two aspects: (1) indicators of forced labour as classification labels and (2) snippets of the text that justify labelling decisions. We hope that our data set can help promote research on explainability for multi-class and multi-label text classification. In this work, we explain our process for collecting the data underpinning the proposed corpus, describe our annotation guidelines and present some statistical analysis of its content. Finally, we summarise the results of baseline experiments based on different variants of the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) model.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.386
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:
3610–3625
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.386
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Erick Mendez Guzman, Viktor Schlegel, and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2022. RaFoLa: A Rationale-Annotated Corpus for Detecting Indicators of Forced Labour. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3610–3625, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
RaFoLa: A Rationale-Annotated Corpus for Detecting Indicators of Forced Labour (Mendez Guzman et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.386.pdf