Merel C. J. Scholman

Also published as: Merel C.J. Scholman


2023

pdf
Design Choices for Crowdsourcing Implicit Discourse Relations: Revealing the Biases Introduced by Task Design
Valentina Pyatkin | Frances Yung | Merel C. J. Scholman | Reut Tsarfaty | Ido Dagan | Vera Demberg
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11

Disagreement in natural language annotation has mostly been studied from a perspective of biases introduced by the annotators and the annotation frameworks. Here, we propose to analyze another source of bias—task design bias, which has a particularly strong impact on crowdsourced linguistic annotations where natural language is used to elicit the interpretation of lay annotators. For this purpose we look at implicit discourse relation annotation, a task that has repeatedly been shown to be difficult due to the relations’ ambiguity. We compare the annotations of 1,200 discourse relations obtained using two distinct annotation tasks and quantify the biases of both methods across four different domains. Both methods are natural language annotation tasks designed for crowdsourcing. We show that the task design can push annotators towards certain relations and that some discourse relation senses can be better elicited with one or the other annotation approach. We also conclude that this type of bias should be taken into account when training and testing models.

2021

pdf bib
Is there less annotator agreement when the discourse relation is underspecified?
Jet Hoek | Merel C.J. Scholman | Ted J.M. Sanders
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Integrating Perspectives on Discourse Annotation