Beyond Labels: Empowering Human Annotators with Natural Language Explanations through a Novel Active-Learning Architecture

Bingsheng Yao, Ishan Jindal, Lucian Popa, Yannis Katsis, Sayan Ghosh, Lihong He, Yuxuan Lu, Shashank Srivastava, Yunyao Li, James Hendler, Dakuo Wang


Abstract
Real-world domain experts (e.g., doctors) rarely annotate only a decision label in their day-to-day workflow without providing explanations. Yet, existing low-resource learning techniques, such as Active Learning (AL), that aim to support human annotators mostly focus on the label while neglecting the natural language explanation of a data point. This work proposes a novel AL architecture to support experts’ real-world need for label and explanation annotations in low-resource scenarios. Our AL architecture leverages an explanation-generation model to produce explanations guided by human explanations, a prediction model that utilizes generated explanations toward prediction faithfully, and a novel data diversity-based AL sampling strategy that benefits from the explanation annotations. Automated and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating explanations into AL sampling and the improved human annotation efficiency and trustworthiness with our AL architecture. Additional ablation studies illustrate the potential of our AL architecture for transfer learning, generalizability, and integration with large language models (LLMs). While LLMs exhibit exceptional explanation-generation capabilities for relatively simple tasks, their effectiveness in complex real-world tasks warrants further in-depth study.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.778
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11629–11643
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.778
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.778
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bingsheng Yao, Ishan Jindal, Lucian Popa, Yannis Katsis, Sayan Ghosh, Lihong He, Yuxuan Lu, Shashank Srivastava, Yunyao Li, James Hendler, and Dakuo Wang. 2023. Beyond Labels: Empowering Human Annotators with Natural Language Explanations through a Novel Active-Learning Architecture. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11629–11643, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Labels: Empowering Human Annotators with Natural Language Explanations through a Novel Active-Learning Architecture (Yao et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.778.pdf