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.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.eacl-short.24
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julian’s, Malta
- Editors:
- Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 268–277
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-short.24
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Joris Baan, Raquel Fernández, Barbara Plank, and Wilker Aziz. 2024. Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation?. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 268–277, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation? (Baan et al., EACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2024.eacl-short.24.pdf