McMaster at LeWiDi-2025: Demographic-Aware RoBERTa

Aadi Sanghani, Sarvin Azadi, Virendra Jethra, Charles Welch


Abstract
We present our submission to the Learning With Disagreements (LeWiDi) 2025 shared task. Our team implemented a variety of BERT-based models that encode annotator meta-data in combination with text to predict soft-label distributions and individual annotator labels. We show across four tasks that a combination of demographic factors leads to improved performance, however through ablations across all demographic variables we find that in some cases, a single variable performs best. Our approach placed 4th in the overall competition.
Anthology ID:
2025.nlperspectives-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Gavin Abercrombie, Valerio Basile, Simona Frenda, Sara Tonelli, Shiran Dudy
Venues:
NLPerspectives | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
208–218
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/bulk-corrections-2025-11-25/2025.nlperspectives-1.18/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.nlperspectives-1.18
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aadi Sanghani, Sarvin Azadi, Virendra Jethra, and Charles Welch. 2025. McMaster at LeWiDi-2025: Demographic-Aware RoBERTa. In Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP, pages 208–218, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
McMaster at LeWiDi-2025: Demographic-Aware RoBERTa (Sanghani et al., NLPerspectives 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/bulk-corrections-2025-11-25/2025.nlperspectives-1.18.pdf