Disagreement in Metaphor Annotation of Mexican Spanish Science Tweets

Alec M. Sanchez-Montero, Gemma Bel-Enguix, Sergio Luis Ojeda Trueba, Gerardo Sierra Martínez


Abstract
Traditional linguistic annotation methods often strive for a gold standard with hard labels as input for natural language processing models, assuming an underlying objective truth for all tasks. However, disagreement among annotators is a common scenario, even for seemingly objective linguistic tasks, and is particularly prominent in figurative language annotation, since multiple valid interpretations can sometimes coexist. This study presents the annotation process for identifying metaphorical tweets within a corpus of 3733 Public Communication of Science texts written in Mexican Spanish, emphasizing inter-annotator disagreement. Using Fleiss’ and Cohen’s Kappa alongside agreement percentages, we evaluated metaphorical language detection through binary classification in three situations: two subsets of the corpus labeled by three different non-expert annotators each, and a subset of disagreement tweets, identified in the non-expert annotation phase, re-labeled by three expert annotators. Our results suggest that expert annotation may improve agreement levels, but does not exclude disagreement, likely due to factors such as the relatively novelty of the genre, the presence of multiple scientific topics, and the blending of specialized and non-specialized discourse. Going further, we propose adopting a learning-from-disagreement approach for capturing diverse annotation perspectives to enhance computational metaphor detection in Mexican Spanish.
Anthology ID:
2025.comedi-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of Context and Meaning: Navigating Disagreements in NLP Annotation
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Michael Roth, Dominik Schlechtweg
Venues:
CoMeDi | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
155–164
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.comedi-1.15/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alec M. Sanchez-Montero, Gemma Bel-Enguix, Sergio Luis Ojeda Trueba, and Gerardo Sierra Martínez. 2025. Disagreement in Metaphor Annotation of Mexican Spanish Science Tweets. In Proceedings of Context and Meaning: Navigating Disagreements in NLP Annotation, pages 155–164, Abu Dhabi, UAE. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Disagreement in Metaphor Annotation of Mexican Spanish Science Tweets (Sanchez-Montero et al., CoMeDi 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.comedi-1.15.pdf