Fine-Grained Perspectives: Modeling Explanations with Annotator-Specific Rationales

Olufunke O. Sarumi, Charles Welch, Daniel Braun


Abstract
Beyond exploring disaggregated labels for modeling perspectives, annotator rationales provide fine-grained signals of individual perspectives. In this work, we propose a framework for jointly modeling annotator-specific label prediction and corresponding explanations, fine-tuned on the annotators’ provided rationales. Using a dataset with disaggregated natural language inference (NLI) annotations and annotator-provided explanations, we condition predictions on both annotator identity and demographic metadata through a representation-level User Passport mechanism. We further introduce two explainer architectures: a post-hoc prompt-based explainer and a prefixed bridge explainer that transfers annotator-conditioned classifier representations directly into a generative model. This design enables explanation generation aligned with individual annotator perspectives. Our results show that incorporating explanation modeling substantially improves predictive performance over a baseline annotator-aware classifier, with the prefixed bridge approach achieving more stable label alignment and higher semantic consistency, while the post-hoc approach yields stronger lexical similarity. These findings indicate that modeling explanations as expressions of fine-grained perspective provides a richer and more faithful representation of disagreement. The proposed approaches advance perspectivist modeling by integrating annotator-specific rationales into both predictive and generative components.
Anthology ID:
2026.nlperspectives-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the the fifth edition of NLPerspectives
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Shiran Dudy, Gavin Abercrombie, Valerio Basile, Elisa Leonardelli, Simona Frenda
Venues:
NLPerspectives | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
66–75
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nlperspectives-07
DOI:
10.63317/4s7kqwvy5i6x
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Olufunke O. Sarumi, Charles Welch, and Daniel Braun. 2026. Fine-Grained Perspectives: Modeling Explanations with Annotator-Specific Rationales. In Proceedings of the the fifth edition of NLPerspectives, pages 66–75, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Fine-Grained Perspectives: Modeling Explanations with Annotator-Specific Rationales (Sarumi et al., NLPerspectives 2026)
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