Incorporating Worker Perspectives into MTurk Annotation Practices for NLP

Olivia Huang, Eve Fleisig, Dan Klein


Abstract
Current practices regarding data collection for natural language processing on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) often rely on a combination of studies on data quality and heuristics shared among NLP researchers. However, without considering the perspectives of MTurk workers, these approaches are susceptible to issues regarding workers’ rights and poor response quality. We conducted a critical literature review and a survey of MTurk workers aimed at addressing open questions regarding best practices for fair payment, worker privacy, data quality, and considering worker incentives. We found that worker preferences are often at odds with received wisdom among NLP researchers. Surveyed workers preferred reliable, reasonable payments over uncertain, very high payments; reported frequently lying on demographic questions; and expressed frustration at having work rejected with no explanation. We also found that workers view some quality control methods, such as requiring minimum response times or Master’s qualifications, as biased and largely ineffective. Based on the survey results, we provide recommendations on how future NLP studies may better account for MTurk workers’ experiences in order to respect workers’ rights and improve data quality.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1010–1028
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.64
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.64
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Olivia Huang, Eve Fleisig, and Dan Klein. 2023. Incorporating Worker Perspectives into MTurk Annotation Practices for NLP. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1010–1028, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Incorporating Worker Perspectives into MTurk Annotation Practices for NLP (Huang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.64.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.64.mp4