Are We Modeling the Task or the Annotator? An Investigation of Annotator Bias in Natural Language Understanding Datasets

Mor Geva, Yoav Goldberg, Jonathan Berant


Abstract
Crowdsourcing has been the prevalent paradigm for creating natural language understanding datasets in recent years. A common crowdsourcing practice is to recruit a small number of high-quality workers, and have them massively generate examples. Having only a few workers generate the majority of examples raises concerns about data diversity, especially when workers freely generate sentences. In this paper, we perform a series of experiments showing these concerns are evident in three recent NLP datasets. We show that model performance improves when training with annotator identifiers as features, and that models are able to recognize the most productive annotators. Moreover, we show that often models do not generalize well to examples from annotators that did not contribute to the training set. Our findings suggest that annotator bias should be monitored during dataset creation, and that test set annotators should be disjoint from training set annotators.
Anthology ID:
D19-1107
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1161–1166
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1107
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1107
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mor Geva, Yoav Goldberg, and Jonathan Berant. 2019. Are We Modeling the Task or the Annotator? An Investigation of Annotator Bias in Natural Language Understanding Datasets. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 1161–1166, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Are We Modeling the Task or the Annotator? An Investigation of Annotator Bias in Natural Language Understanding Datasets (Geva et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1107.pdf
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