Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems use annotated corpora for training and evaluation. However, labeled data is often costly to obtain and scaling annotation projects is difficult, which is why annotation tasks are often outsourced to paid crowdworkers. Citizen Science is an alternative to crowdsourcing that is relatively unexplored in the context of NLP. To investigate whether and how well Citizen Science can be applied in this setting, we conduct an exploratory study into engaging different groups of volunteers in Citizen Science for NLP by re-annotating parts of a pre-existing crowdsourced dataset. Our results show that this can yield high-quality annotations and at- tract motivated volunteers, but also requires considering factors such as scalability, participation over time, and legal and ethical issues. We summarize lessons learned in the form of guidelines and provide our code and data to aid future work on Citizen Science.

Continuous learning from free-text human feedback, such as error corrections, new knowledge, or alternative responses, is essential for today’s chatbots and virtual assistants to stay up-to-date, engaging, and socially acceptable. However, for research on methods for learning from such data, annotated data is scarce. To address this, we examine the error and user response types of six popular dialogue datasets from various types, including MultiWoZ, PersonaChat, Wizards-of-Wikipedia, and others, to assess their extendibility with the needed annotations. For this corpus study, we manually annotate a subset of each dataset with error and user response types using an improved version of the Integrated Error Taxonomy and a newly proposed user response type taxonomy. We provide the resulting dataset (EURTAD) to the community. Our findings provide new insights into dataset composition, including error types, user response types, and the relations between them.

State-of-the-art pretrained language models tend to perform below their capabilities when applied out-of-the-box on tasks that require understanding and working with numbers (usually referred to as numeracy). Recent work suggests two main reasons for this: (1) popular tokenisation algorithms have limited expressiveness for numbers, and (2) common pretraining objectives do not target numeracy. Approaches that address these shortcomings usually require architectural changes or pretraining from scratch. In this paper, we propose a new extended pretraining approach called Arithmetic-Based Pretraining that jointly addresses both in one extended pretraining step without requiring architectural changes or pretraining from scratch. Arithmetic-Based Pretraining combines contrastive learning to improve the number representation, and a novel extended pretraining objective called Inferable Number Prediction Task to improve numeracy. Our experiments show the effectiveness of Arithmetic-Based Pretraining in three different tasks that require improved numeracy, i.e., reading comprehension in the DROP dataset, inference-on-tables in the InfoTabs dataset, and table-to-text generation in the WikiBio and SciGen datasets.