Identifying and Measuring Annotator Bias Based on Annotators’ Demographic Characteristics

Hala Al Kuwatly, Maximilian Wich, Georg Groh


Abstract
Machine learning is recently used to detect hate speech and other forms of abusive language in online platforms. However, a notable weakness of machine learning models is their vulnerability to bias, which can impair their performance and fairness. One type is annotator bias caused by the subjective perception of the annotators. In this work, we investigate annotator bias using classification models trained on data from demographically distinct annotator groups. To do so, we sample balanced subsets of data that are labeled by demographically distinct annotators. We then train classifiers on these subsets, analyze their performances on similarly grouped test sets, and compare them statistically. Our findings show that the proposed approach successfully identifies bias and that demographic features, such as first language, age, and education, correlate with significant performance differences.
Anthology ID:
2020.alw-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
ALW
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
184–190
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.alw-1.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.alw-1.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hala Al Kuwatly, Maximilian Wich, and Georg Groh. 2020. Identifying and Measuring Annotator Bias Based on Annotators’ Demographic Characteristics. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms, pages 184–190, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying and Measuring Annotator Bias Based on Annotators’ Demographic Characteristics (Al Kuwatly et al., ALW 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.alw-1.21.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.alw-1.21.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939538