Disagreement Matters: Preserving Label Diversity by Jointly Modeling Item and Annotator Label Distributions with DisCo

Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Alexander Ororbia, Raj B Bhensadadia, Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh, Christopher Homan

Findings: Ethics and NLP Findings Paper

Session 4: Ethics and NLP (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 11, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 4 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Spotlight Session: Spotlight - Metropolitan West (Spotlight)
Conference Room: Metropolitan West
Conference Time: July 10, 19:00-21:00 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Spotlight Session (23:00-01:00 UTC)
Keywords: model bias/fairness evaluation
TLDR: 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 populatio...
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Abstract: 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.