When Do Annotator Demographics Matter? Measuring the Influence of Annotator Demographics with the POPQUORN Dataset

Jiaxin Pei, David Jurgens


Abstract
Annotators are not fungible. Their demographics, life experiences, and backgrounds all contribute to how they label data. However, NLP has only recently considered how annotator identity might influence their decisions. Here, we present POPQUORN (the Potato-Prolific dataset for Question-Answering, Offensiveness, text Rewriting and politeness rating with demographic Nuance). POPQUORN contains 45,000 annotations from 1,484 annotators, drawn from a representative sample regarding sex, age, and race as the US population. Through a series of analyses, we show that annotators’ background plays a significant role in their judgments. Further, our work shows that backgrounds not previously considered in NLP (e.g., education), are meaningful and should be considered. Our study suggests that understanding the background of annotators and collecting labels from a demographically balanced pool of crowd workers is important to reduce the bias of datasets. The dataset, annotator background, and annotation interface are available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Pei/potato-prolific-dataset.
Anthology ID:
2023.law-1.25
Original:
2023.law-1.25v1
Version 2:
2023.law-1.25v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jakob Prange, Annemarie Friedrich
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
252–265
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.law-1.25
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.law-1.25
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaxin Pei and David Jurgens. 2023. When Do Annotator Demographics Matter? Measuring the Influence of Annotator Demographics with the POPQUORN Dataset. In Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII), pages 252–265, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When Do Annotator Demographics Matter? Measuring the Influence of Annotator Demographics with the POPQUORN Dataset (Pei & Jurgens, LAW 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.law-1.25.pdf