Lora Aroyo


2021

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Cross-replication Reliability - An Empirical Approach to Interpreting Inter-rater Reliability
Ka Wong | Praveen Paritosh | Lora Aroyo
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

When collecting annotations and labeled data from humans, a standard practice is to use inter-rater reliability (IRR) as a measure of data goodness (Hallgren, 2012). Metrics such as Krippendorff’s alpha or Cohen’s kappa are typically required to be above a threshold of 0.6 (Landis and Koch, 1977). These absolute thresholds are unreasonable for crowdsourced data from annotators with high cultural and training variances, especially on subjective topics. We present a new alternative to interpreting IRR that is more empirical and contextualized. It is based upon benchmarking IRR against baseline measures in a replication, one of which is a novel cross-replication reliability (xRR) measure based on Cohen’s (1960) kappa. We call this approach the xRR framework. We opensource a replication dataset of 4 million human judgements of facial expressions and analyze it with the proposed framework. We argue this framework can be used to measure the quality of crowdsourced datasets.

2019

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A Crowdsourced Frame Disambiguation Corpus with Ambiguity
Anca Dumitrache | Lora Aroyo | Chris Welty
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

We present a resource for the task of FrameNet semantic frame disambiguation of over 5,000 word-sentence pairs from the Wikipedia corpus. The annotations were collected using a novel crowdsourcing approach with multiple workers per sentence to capture inter-annotator disagreement. In contrast to the typical approach of attributing the best single frame to each word, we provide a list of frames with disagreement-based scores that express the confidence with which each frame applies to the word. This is based on the idea that inter-annotator disagreement is at least partly caused by ambiguity that is inherent to the text and frames. We have found many examples where the semantics of individual frames overlap sufficiently to make them acceptable alternatives for interpreting a sentence. We have argued that ignoring this ambiguity creates an overly arbitrary target for training and evaluating natural language processing systems - if humans cannot agree, why would we expect the correct answer from a machine to be any different? To process this data we also utilized an expanded lemma-set provided by the Framester system, which merges FN with WordNet to enhance coverage. Our dataset includes annotations of 1,000 sentence-word pairs whose lemmas are not part of FN. Finally we present metrics for evaluating frame disambiguation systems that account for ambiguity.

2018

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Scoring and Classifying Implicit Positive Interpretations: A Challenge of Class Imbalance
Chantal van Son | Roser Morante | Lora Aroyo | Piek Vossen
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper reports on a reimplementation of a system on detecting implicit positive meaning from negated statements. In the original regression experiment, different positive interpretations per negation are scored according to their likelihood. We convert the scores to classes and report our results on both the regression and classification tasks. We show that a baseline taking the mean score or most frequent class is hard to beat because of class imbalance in the dataset. Our error analysis indicates that an approach that takes the information structure into account (i.e. which information is new or contrastive) may be promising, which requires looking beyond the syntactic and semantic characteristics of negated statements.

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Crowdsourcing Semantic Label Propagation in Relation Classification
Anca Dumitrache | Lora Aroyo | Chris Welty
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)

Distant supervision is a popular method for performing relation extraction from text that is known to produce noisy labels. Most progress in relation extraction and classification has been made with crowdsourced corrections to distant-supervised labels, and there is evidence that indicates still more would be better. In this paper, we explore the problem of propagating human annotation signals gathered for open-domain relation classification through the CrowdTruth methodology for crowdsourcing, that captures ambiguity in annotations by measuring inter-annotator disagreement. Our approach propagates annotations to sentences that are similar in a low dimensional embedding space, expanding the number of labels by two orders of magnitude. Our experiments show significant improvement in a sentence-level multi-class relation classifier.

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Homonym Detection For Humor Recognition In Short Text
Sven van den Beukel | Lora Aroyo
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

In this paper, automatic homophone- and homograph detection are suggested as new useful features for humor recognition systems. The system combines style-features from previous studies on humor recognition in short text with ambiguity-based features. The performance of two potentially useful homograph detection methods is evaluated using crowdsourced annotations as ground truth. Adding homophones and homographs as features to the classifier results in a small but significant improvement over the style-features alone. For the task of humor recognition, recall appears to be a more important quality measure than precision. Although the system was designed for humor recognition in oneliners, it also performs well at the classification of longer humorous texts.

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Resource Interoperability for Sustainable Benchmarking: The Case of Events
Chantal van Son | Oana Inel | Roser Morante | Lora Aroyo | Piek Vossen
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2016

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Unshared Task at the 3rd Workshop on Argument Mining: Perspective Based Local Agreement and Disagreement in Online Debate
Chantal van Son | Tommaso Caselli | Antske Fokkens | Isa Maks | Roser Morante | Lora Aroyo | Piek Vossen
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016)

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GRaSP: A Multilayered Annotation Scheme for Perspectives
Chantal van Son | Tommaso Caselli | Antske Fokkens | Isa Maks | Roser Morante | Lora Aroyo | Piek Vossen
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This paper presents a framework and methodology for the annotation of perspectives in text. In the last decade, different aspects of linguistic encoding of perspectives have been targeted as separated phenomena through different annotation initiatives. We propose an annotation scheme that integrates these different phenomena. We use a multilayered annotation approach, splitting the annotation of different aspects of perspectives into small subsequent subtasks in order to reduce the complexity of the task and to better monitor interactions between layers. Currently, we have included four layers of perspective annotation: events, attribution, factuality and opinion. The annotations are integrated in a formal model called GRaSP, which provides the means to represent instances (e.g. events, entities) and propositions in the (real or assumed) world in relation to their mentions in text. Then, the relation between the source and target of a perspective is characterized by means of perspective annotations. This enables us to place alternative perspectives on the same entity, event or proposition next to each other.

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The VU Sound Corpus: Adding More Fine-grained Annotations to the Freesound Database
Emiel van Miltenburg | Benjamin Timmermans | Lora Aroyo
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This paper presents a collection of annotations (tags or keywords) for a set of 2,133 environmental sounds taken from the Freesound database (www.freesound.org). The annotations are acquired through an open-ended crowd-labeling task, in which participants were asked to provide keywords for each of three sounds. The main goal of this study is to find out (i) whether it is feasible to collect keywords for a large collection of sounds through crowdsourcing, and (ii) how people talk about sounds, and what information they can infer from hearing a sound in isolation. Our main finding is that it is not only feasible to perform crowd-labeling for a large collection of sounds, it is also very useful to highlight different aspects of the sounds that authors may fail to mention. Our data is freely available, and can be used to ground semantic models, improve search in audio databases, and to study the language of sound.

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Crowdsourcing Salient Information from News and Tweets
Oana Inel | Tommaso Caselli | Lora Aroyo
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

The increasing streams of information pose challenges to both humans and machines. On the one hand, humans need to identify relevant information and consume only the information that lies at their interests. On the other hand, machines need to understand the information that is published in online data streams and generate concise and meaningful overviews. We consider events as prime factors to query for information and generate meaningful context. The focus of this paper is to acquire empirical insights for identifying salience features in tweets and news about a target event, i.e., the event of “whaling”. We first derive a methodology to identify such features by building up a knowledge space of the event enriched with relevant phrases, sentiments and ranked by their novelty. We applied this methodology on tweets and we have performed preliminary work towards adapting it to news articles. Our results show that crowdsourcing text relevance, sentiments and novelty (1) can be a main step in identifying salient information, and (2) provides a deeper and more precise understanding of the data at hand compared to state-of-the-art approaches.