Why Don’t You Do It Right? Analysing Annotators’ Disagreement in Subjective Tasks

Marta Sandri, Elisa Leonardelli, Sara Tonelli, Elisabetta Jezek


Abstract
Annotators’ disagreement in linguistic data has been recently the focus of multiple initiatives aimed at raising awareness on issues related to ‘majority voting’ when aggregating diverging annotations. Disagreement can indeed reflect different aspects of linguistic annotation, from annotators’ subjectivity to sloppiness or lack of enough context to interpret a text. In this work we first propose a taxonomy of possible reasons leading to annotators’ disagreement in subjective tasks. Then, we manually label part of a Twitter dataset for offensive language detection in English following this taxonomy, identifying how the different categories are distributed. Finally we run a set of experiments aimed at assessing the impact of the different types of disagreement on classification performance. In particular, we investigate how accurately tweets belonging to different categories of disagreement can be classified as offensive or not, and how injecting data with different types of disagreement in the training set affects performance. We also perform offensive language detection as a multi-task framework, using disagreement classification as an auxiliary task.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.178
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2428–2441
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.178
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.178
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marta Sandri, Elisa Leonardelli, Sara Tonelli, and Elisabetta Jezek. 2023. Why Don’t You Do It Right? Analysing Annotators’ Disagreement in Subjective Tasks. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2428–2441, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Why Don’t You Do It Right? Analysing Annotators’ Disagreement in Subjective Tasks (Sandri et al., EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.178.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.178.mp4