Disagreement in Argumentation Annotation

Anna Lindahl


Abstract
Disagreement, perspective or error? There is a growing discussion against the idea of a unified ground truth in annotated data, as well as the usefulness of such a ground truth and resulting gold standard. In data perspectivism, this issue is exemplified with tasks such as hate speech or sentiment classification in which annotators’ different perspectives are important to include. In this paper we turn to argumentation, a related field which has had less focus from this point of view. Argumentation is difficult to annotate for several reasons, from the more practical parts of deciding where the argumentation begins and ends to questions of how argumentation is defined and what it consists of. Learning more about disagreement is therefore important in order to improve argument annotation and to better utilize argument annotated data. Because of this, we examine disagreement in two corpora annotated with argumentation both manually and computationally. We find that disagreement is often not because of annotation errors or mistakes but due to the possibility of multiple possible interpretations. More specifically, these interpretations can be over boundaries, label or existence of argumentation. These results emphasize the need for more thorough analysis of disagreement in data, outside of the more common inter-annotator agreement measures.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlperspectives-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Gavin Abercrombie, Valerio Basile, Davide Bernadi, Shiran Dudy, Simona Frenda, Lucy Havens, Sara Tonelli
Venues:
NLPerspectives | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
56–66
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlperspectives-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Lindahl. 2024. Disagreement in Argumentation Annotation. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 56–66, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Disagreement in Argumentation Annotation (Lindahl, NLPerspectives-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlperspectives-1.6.pdf