Annotator-Centric Active Learning for Subjective NLP Tasks

Michiel Van Der Meer, Neele Falk, Pradeep Murukannaiah, Enrico Liscio


Abstract
Active Learning (AL) addresses the high costs of collecting human annotations by strategically annotating the most informative samples. However, for subjective NLP tasks, incorporating a wide range of perspectives in the annotation process is crucial to capture the variability in human judgments. We introduce Annotator-Centric Active Learning (ACAL), which incorporates an annotator selection strategy following data sampling. Our objective is two-fold: (1) to efficiently approximate the full diversity of human judgments, and (2) to assess model performance using annotator-centric metrics, which value minority and majority perspectives equally. We experiment with multiple annotator selection strategies across seven subjective NLP tasks, employing both traditional and novel, human-centered evaluation metrics. Our findings indicate that ACAL improves data efficiency and excels in annotator-centric performance evaluations. However, its success depends on the availability of a sufficiently large and diverse pool of annotators to sample from.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1031
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18537–18555
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1031
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michiel Van Der Meer, Neele Falk, Pradeep Murukannaiah, and Enrico Liscio. 2024. Annotator-Centric Active Learning for Subjective NLP Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 18537–18555, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Annotator-Centric Active Learning for Subjective NLP Tasks (Van Der Meer et al., EMNLP 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1031.pdf
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