Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya


2023

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Subjective Crowd Disagreements for Subjective Data: Uncovering Meaningful CrowdOpinion with Population-level Learning
Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya | Sarah Luger | Saloni Poddar | Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh | Christopher Homan
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Human-annotated data plays a critical role in the fairness of AI systems, including those that deal with life-altering decisions or moderating human-created web/social media content. Conventionally, annotator disagreements are resolved before any learning takes place. However, researchers are increasingly identifying annotator disagreement as pervasive and meaningful. They also question the performance of a system when annotators disagree. Particularly when minority views are disregarded, especially among groups that may already be underrepresented in the annotator population. In this paper, we introduce CrowdOpinion, an unsupervised learning based approach that uses language features and label distributions to pool similar items into larger samples of label distributions. We experiment with four generative and one density-based clustering method, applied to five linear combinations of label distributions and features. We use five publicly available benchmark datasets (with varying levels of annotator disagreements) from social media (Twitter, Gab, and Reddit). We also experiment in the wild using a dataset from Facebook, where annotations come from the platform itself by users reacting to posts. We evaluate CrowdOpinion as a label distribution prediction task using KL-divergence and a single-label problem using accuracy measures.

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Disagreement Matters: Preserving Label Diversity by Jointly Modeling Item and Annotator Label Distributions with DisCo
Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya | Alexander Ororbia | Raj Bhensadadia | Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh | Christopher Homan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Annotator disagreement is common whenever human judgment is needed for supervised learning. It is conventional to assume that one label per item represents ground truth. However, this obscures minority opinions, if present. We regard “ground truth” as the distribution of all labels that a population of annotators could produce, if asked (and of which we only have a small sample). We next introduce DisCo (Distribution from Context), a simple neural model that learns to predict this distribution. The model takes annotator-item pairs, rather than items alone, as input, and performs inference by aggregating over all annotators. Despite its simplicity, our experiments show that, on six benchmark datasets, our model is competitive with, and frequently outperforms, other, more complex models that either do not model specific annotators or were not designed for label distribution learning.

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Findings from the Bambara - French Machine Translation Competition (BFMT 2023)
Ninoh Agostinho Da Silva | Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi | Alexander Antonov | Panga Azazia Kamate | Moussa Coulibaly | Mason Del Rio | Yacouba Diarra | Sebastian Diarra | Chris Emezue | Joel Hamilcaro | Christopher M. Homan | Alexander Most | Joseph Mwatukange | Peter Ohue | Michael Pham | Abdoulaye Sako | Sokhar Samb | Yaya Sy | Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya | Yacine Zahidi | Sarah Luger
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2023)

Orange Silicon Valley hosted a low-resource machine translation (MT) competition with monetary prizes. The goals of the competition were to raise awareness of the challenges in the low-resource MT domain, improve MT algorithms and data strategies, and support MT expertise development in the regions where people speak Bambara and other low-resource languages. The participants built Bambara to French and French to Bambara machine translation systems using data provided by the organizers and additional data resources shared amongst the competitors. This paper details each team’s different approaches and motivation for ongoing work in Bambara and the broader low-resource machine translation domain.

2022

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Annotator Response Distributions as a Sampling Frame
Christopher Homan | Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya | Lora Aroyo | Chris Welty
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP @LREC2022

Annotator disagreement is often dismissed as noise or the result of poor annotation process quality. Others have argued that it can be meaningful. But lacking a rigorous statistical foundation, the analysis of disagreement patterns can resemble a high-tech form of tea-leaf-reading. We contribute a framework for analyzing the variation of per-item annotator response distributions to data for humans-in-the-loop machine learning. We provide visualizations for, and use the framework to analyze the variance in, a crowdsourced dataset of hard-to-classify examples from the OpenImages archive.

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Improving Label Quality by Jointly Modeling Items and Annotators
Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya | Alexander Ororbia | Christopher Homan
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP @LREC2022

We propose a fully Bayesian framework for learning ground truth labels from noisy annotators. Our framework ensures scalability by factoring a generative, Bayesian soft clustering model over label distributions into the classic David and Skene joint annotator-data model. Earlier research along these lines has neither fully incorporated label distributions nor explored clustering by annotators only or data only. Our framework incorporates all of these properties within a graphical model designed to provide better ground truth estimates of annotator responses as input to any black box supervised learning algorithm. We conduct supervised learning experiments with variations of our models and compare them to the performance of several baseline models.