Crowdsourcing has been ubiquitously used for annotating enormous collections of data. However, the major obstacles to using crowd-sourced labels are noise and errors from non-expert annotations. In this work, two approaches dealing with the noise and
errors in crowd-sourced labels are proposed. The first approach uses Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), an optimization technique robust to noisy labels. The other approach leverages a neural network layer called softmax-Crowdlayer specifically designed to learn from crowd-sourced annotations. According to the results, the proposed approaches can improve the performance of the Wide Residual Network model and Multi-layer Perception model applied on crowd-sourced datasets in the image processing domain. It also has similar and comparable results with the majority voting technique when applied to the sequential data domain whereby the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is used as the base model in both instances.
Disagreement between coders is ubiquitous in virtually all datasets annotated with human judgements in both natural language processing and computer vision. However, most supervised machine learning methods assume that a single preferred interpretati
on exists for each item, which is at best an idealization. The aim of the SemEval-2021 shared task on learning with disagreements (Le-Wi-Di) was to provide a unified testing framework for methods for learning from data containing multiple and possibly contradictory annotations covering the best-known datasets containing information about disagreements for interpreting language and classifying images. In this paper we describe the shared task and its results.
Natural language inference (NLI) is the task of determining whether a piece of text is entailed, contradicted by or unrelated to another piece of text. In this paper, we investigate how to tease systematic inferences (i.e., items for which people agr
ee on the NLI label) apart from disagreement items (i.e., items which lead to different annotations), which most prior work has overlooked. To distinguish systematic inferences from disagreement items, we propose Artificial Annotators (AAs) to simulate the uncertainty in the annotation process by capturing the modes in annotations. Results on the CommitmentBank, a corpus of naturally occurring discourses in English, confirm that our approach performs statistically significantly better than all baselines. We further show that AAs learn linguistic patterns and context-dependent reasoning.
