On Efficient and Statistical Quality Estimation for Data Annotation

Jan-Christoph Klie, Juan Haladjian, Marc Kirchner, Rahul Nair


Abstract
Annotated datasets are an essential ingredient to train, evaluate, compare and productionalize supervised machine learning models. It is therefore imperative that annotations are of high quality. For their creation, good quality management and thereby reliable quality estimates are needed. Then, if quality is insufficient during the annotation process, rectifying measures can be taken to improve it. Quality estimation is often performed by having experts manually label instances as correct or incorrect. But checking all annotated instances tends to be expensive. Therefore, in practice, usually only subsets are inspected; sizes are chosen mostly without justification or regard to statistical power and more often than not, are relatively small. Basing estimates on small sample sizes, however, can lead to imprecise values for the error rate. Using unnecessarily large sample sizes costs money that could be better spent, for instance on more annotations. Therefore, we first describe in detail how to use confidence intervals for finding the minimal sample size needed to estimate the annotation error rate. Then, we propose applying acceptance sampling as an alternative to error rate estimation We show that acceptance sampling can reduce the required sample sizes up to 50% while providing the same statistical guarantees.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.837
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15680–15696
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.837
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jan-Christoph Klie, Juan Haladjian, Marc Kirchner, and Rahul Nair. 2024. On Efficient and Statistical Quality Estimation for Data Annotation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15680–15696, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On Efficient and Statistical Quality Estimation for Data Annotation (Klie et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.837.pdf