Cost-Efficient Subjective Task Annotation and Modeling through Few-Shot Annotator Adaptation

Preni Golazizian, Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari, Ali Omrani, Morteza Dehghani


Abstract
In subjective NLP tasks, where a single ground truth does not exist, the inclusion of diverse annotators becomes crucial as their unique perspectives significantly influence the annotations. In realistic scenarios, the annotation budget often becomes the main determinant of the number of perspectives (i.e., annotators) included in the data and subsequent modeling. We introduce a novel framework for annotation collection and modeling in subjective tasks that aims to minimize the annotation budget while maximizing the predictive performance for each annotator. Our framework has a two-stage design: first, we rely on a small set of annotators to build a multitask model, and second, we augment the model for a new perspective by strategically annotating a few samples per annotator. To test our framework at scale, we introduce and release a unique dataset, Moral Foundations Subjective Corpus, of 2000 Reddit posts annotated by 24 annotators for moral sentiment. We demonstrate that our framework surpasses the previous SOTA in capturing the annotators’ individual perspectives with as little as 25% of the original annotation budget on two datasets. Furthermore, our framework results in more equitable models, reducing the performance disparity among annotators.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.199
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3474–3491
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.199/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.199
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Preni Golazizian, Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari, Ali Omrani, and Morteza Dehghani. 2024. Cost-Efficient Subjective Task Annotation and Modeling through Few-Shot Annotator Adaptation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 3474–3491, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cost-Efficient Subjective Task Annotation and Modeling through Few-Shot Annotator Adaptation (Golazizian et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.199.pdf
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 2024.findings-emnlp.199.data.zip