@inproceedings{baan-etal-2024-interpreting,
    title = "Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation?",
    author = "Baan, Joris  and
      Fern{\'a}ndez, Raquel  and
      Plank, Barbara  and
      Aziz, Wilker",
    editor = "Graham, Yvette  and
      Purver, Matthew",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2024",
    address = "St. Julian{'}s, Malta",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.eacl-short.24/",
    pages = "268--277",
    abstract = "With the rise of increasingly powerful and user-facing NLP systems, there is growing interest in assessing whether they have a good {\_}representation of uncertainty{\_} by evaluating the quality of their predictive distribution over outcomes. We identify two main perspectives that drive starkly different evaluation protocols. The first treats predictive probability as an indication of model confidence; the second as an indication of human label variation. We discuss their merits and limitations, and take the position that both are crucial for trustworthy and fair NLP systems, but that exploiting a single predictive distribution is limiting. We recommend tools and highlight exciting directions towards models with disentangled representations of uncertainty about predictions and uncertainty about human labels."
}