Explaining Why: How Instructions and User Interfaces Impact Annotator Rationales When Labeling Text Data
Jamar Sullivan Jr., Will Brackenbury, Andrew McNutt, Kevin Bryson, Kwam Byll, Yuxin Chen, Michael Littman, Chenhao Tan
Abstract
In the context of data labeling, NLP researchers are increasingly interested in having humans select rationales, a subset of input tokens relevant to the chosen label. We conducted a 332-participant online user study to understand how humans select rationales, especially how different instructions and user interface affordances impact the rationales chosen. Participants labeled ten movie reviews as positive or negative, selecting words and phrases supporting their label as rationales. We varied the instructions given, the rationale-selection task, and the user interface. Participants often selected about 12% of input tokens as rationales, but selected fewer if unable to drag over multiple tokens at once. Whereas participants were near unanimous in their data labels, they were far less consistent in their rationales. The user interface affordances and task greatly impacted the types of rationales chosen. We also observed large variance across participants.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sullivan-etal-2022-explaining,
title = "Explaining Why: How Instructions and User Interfaces Impact Annotator Rationales When Labeling Text Data",
author = "Sullivan Jr., Jamar and
Brackenbury, Will and
McNutt, Andrew and
Bryson, Kevin and
Byll, Kwam and
Chen, Yuxin and
Littman, Michael and
Tan, Chenhao and
Ur, Blase",
editor = "Carpuat, Marine and
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine and
Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jul,
year = "2022",
address = "Seattle, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.38/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.38",
pages = "521--531"
}