A Needle in a Haystack: An Analysis of High-Agreement Workers on MTurk for Summarization

Lining Zhang, Simon Mille, Yufang Hou, Daniel Deutsch, Elizabeth Clark, Yixin Liu, Saad Mahamood, Sebastian Gehrmann, Miruna Clinciu, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, João Sedoc


Abstract
To prevent the costly and inefficient use of resources on low-quality annotations, we want a method for creating a pool of dependable annotators who can effectively complete difficult tasks, such as evaluating automatic summarization. Thus, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality Amazon Mechanical Turk workers via a two-step pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out subpar workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-agreement annotations with similar constraints on resources. Although our workers demonstrate a strong consensus among themselves and CloudResearch workers, their alignment with expert judgments on a subset of the data is not as expected and needs further training in correctness. This paper still serves as a best practice for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.835
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14944–14982
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.835
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.835
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lining Zhang, Simon Mille, Yufang Hou, Daniel Deutsch, Elizabeth Clark, Yixin Liu, Saad Mahamood, Sebastian Gehrmann, Miruna Clinciu, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, and João Sedoc. 2023. A Needle in a Haystack: An Analysis of High-Agreement Workers on MTurk for Summarization. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14944–14982, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Needle in a Haystack: An Analysis of High-Agreement Workers on MTurk for Summarization (Zhang et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.835.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2023.acl-long.835.mp4