Subjective Crowd Disagreements for Subjective Data: Uncovering Meaningful CrowdOpinion with Population-level Learning

Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Sarah Luger, Saloni Poddar, Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh, Christopher Homan


Abstract
Human-annotated data plays a critical role in the fairness of AI systems, including those that deal with life-altering decisions or moderating human-created web/social media content. Conventionally, annotator disagreements are resolved before any learning takes place. However, researchers are increasingly identifying annotator disagreement as pervasive and meaningful. They also question the performance of a system when annotators disagree. Particularly when minority views are disregarded, especially among groups that may already be underrepresented in the annotator population. In this paper, we introduce CrowdOpinion, an unsupervised learning based approach that uses language features and label distributions to pool similar items into larger samples of label distributions. We experiment with four generative and one density-based clustering method, applied to five linear combinations of label distributions and features. We use five publicly available benchmark datasets (with varying levels of annotator disagreements) from social media (Twitter, Gab, and Reddit). We also experiment in the wild using a dataset from Facebook, where annotations come from the platform itself by users reacting to posts. We evaluate CrowdOpinion as a label distribution prediction task using KL-divergence and a single-label problem using accuracy measures.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
950–966
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.54
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.54
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Sarah Luger, Saloni Poddar, Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh, and Christopher Homan. 2023. Subjective Crowd Disagreements for Subjective Data: Uncovering Meaningful CrowdOpinion with Population-level Learning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 950–966, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Subjective Crowd Disagreements for Subjective Data: Uncovering Meaningful CrowdOpinion with Population-level Learning (Weerasooriya et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.54.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.54.mp4