VariErr NLI: Separating Annotation Error from Human Label Variation
Leon Weber-Genzel, Siyao Peng, Marie-Catherine De Marneffe, Barbara Plank
Abstract
Human label variation arises when annotators assign different labels to the same item for valid reasons, while annotation errors occur when labels are assigned for invalid reasons. These two issues are prevalent in NLP benchmarks, yet existing research has studied them in isolation. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no prior work that focuses on teasing apart error from signal, especially in cases where signal is beyond black-and-white.To fill this gap, we introduce a systematic methodology and a new dataset, VariErr (variation versus error), focusing on the NLI task in English. We propose a 2-round annotation procedure with annotators explaining each label and subsequently judging the validity of label-explanation pairs.VariErr contains 7,732 validity judgments on 1,933 explanations for 500 re-annotated MNLI items. We assess the effectiveness of various automatic error detection (AED) methods and GPTs in uncovering errors versus human label variation. We find that state-of-the-art AED methods significantly underperform GPTs and humans. While GPT-4 is the best system, it still falls short of human performance. Our methodology is applicable beyond NLI, offering fertile ground for future research on error versus plausible variation, which in turn can yield better and more trustworthy NLP systems.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.123
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2256–2269
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.123
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.123
- Cite (ACL):
- Leon Weber-Genzel, Siyao Peng, Marie-Catherine De Marneffe, and Barbara Plank. 2024. VariErr NLI: Separating Annotation Error from Human Label Variation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2256–2269, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- VariErr NLI: Separating Annotation Error from Human Label Variation (Weber-Genzel et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.acl-long.123.pdf