Agreeing to Disagree: Annotating Offensive Language Datasets with Annotators’ Disagreement

Elisa Leonardelli, Stefano Menini, Alessio Palmero Aprosio, Marco Guerini, Sara Tonelli


Abstract
Since state-of-the-art approaches to offensive language detection rely on supervised learning, it is crucial to quickly adapt them to the continuously evolving scenario of social media. While several approaches have been proposed to tackle the problem from an algorithmic perspective, so to reduce the need for annotated data, less attention has been paid to the quality of these data. Following a trend that has emerged recently, we focus on the level of agreement among annotators while selecting data to create offensive language datasets, a task involving a high level of subjectivity. Our study comprises the creation of three novel datasets of English tweets covering different topics and having five crowd-sourced judgments each. We also present an extensive set of experiments showing that selecting training and test data according to different levels of annotators’ agreement has a strong effect on classifiers performance and robustness. Our findings are further validated in cross-domain experiments and studied using a popular benchmark dataset. We show that such hard cases, where low agreement is present, are not necessarily due to poor-quality annotation and we advocate for a higher presence of ambiguous cases in future datasets, in order to train more robust systems and better account for the different points of view expressed online.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.822
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10528–10539
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.822
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.822
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elisa Leonardelli, Stefano Menini, Alessio Palmero Aprosio, Marco Guerini, and Sara Tonelli. 2021. Agreeing to Disagree: Annotating Offensive Language Datasets with Annotators’ Disagreement. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10528–10539, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Agreeing to Disagree: Annotating Offensive Language Datasets with Annotators’ Disagreement (Leonardelli et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.822.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.822.mp4
Code
 dhfbk/annotators-agreement-dataset