Unveiling the Multi-Annotation Process: Examining the Influence of Annotation Quantity and Instance Difficulty on Model Performance

Pritam Kadasi, Mayank Singh


Abstract
The NLP community has long advocated for the construction of multi-annotator datasets to better capture the nuances of language interpretation, subjectivity, and ambiguity. This paper conducts a retrospective study to show how performance scores can vary when a dataset expands from a single annotation per instance to multiple annotations. We propose a novel multi-annotator simulation process to generate datasets with varying annotation budgets. We show that similar datasets with the same annotation budget can lead to varying performance gains. Our findings challenge the popular belief that models trained on multi-annotation examples always lead to better performance than models trained on single or few-annotation examples.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.96
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1371–1388
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.96
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.96
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pritam Kadasi and Mayank Singh. 2023. Unveiling the Multi-Annotation Process: Examining the Influence of Annotation Quantity and Instance Difficulty on Model Performance. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 1371–1388, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unveiling the Multi-Annotation Process: Examining the Influence of Annotation Quantity and Instance Difficulty on Model Performance (Kadasi & Singh, Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.96.pdf