English
Related papers

Related papers: The 'Problem' of Human Label Variation: On Ground …

200 papers

Supervised machine learning assumes that labeled data provide accurate measurements of the concepts models are meant to learn. Yet in practice, human labeling introduces systematic variation arising from ambiguous items, divergent…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-10 Robert Chew , Stephanie Eckman , Christoph Kern , Frauke Kreuter

Access to high-quality labeled data remains a limiting factor in applied supervised learning. While label variation (LV), i.e., differing labels for the same instance, is common, especially in natural language processing, annotation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Cornelia Gruber , Helen Alber , Bernd Bischl , Göran Kauermann , Barbara Plank , Matthias Aßenmacher

Human Label Variation (HLV), i.e. systematic differences among annotators' judgments, remains underexplored in benchmarks despite rapid progress in large language model (LLM) development. We address this gap by introducing an evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Tomas Ruiz , Tanalp Agustoslu , Carsten Schwemmer

In supervised learning, low quality annotations lead to poorly performing classification and detection models, while also rendering evaluation unreliable. This is particularly apparent on temporal data, where annotation quality is affected…

High-quality data is a key aspect of modern machine learning. However, labels generated by humans suffer from issues like label noise and class ambiguities. We raise the question of whether hard labels are sufficient to represent the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Vasco Grossmann , Lars Schmarje , Reinhard Koch

Many questions that we ask about the world do not have a single clear answer, yet typical human annotation set-ups in machine learning assume there must be a single ground truth label for all examples in every task. The divergence between…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Alicia Parrish , Sarah Laszlo , Lora Aroyo

Human label variation arises when annotators assign different labels to the same item for valid reasons, while annotation errors occur when labels are assigned for invalid reasons. These two issues are prevalent in NLP benchmarks, yet…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Leon Weber-Genzel , Siyao Peng , Marie-Catherine de Marneffe , Barbara Plank

Human Label Variation (HLV) refers to legitimate disagreement in annotation that reflects the diversity of human perspectives rather than mere error. Long treated in NLP as noise to be eliminated, HLV has only recently been reframed as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Shanshan Xu , Santosh T. Y. S. S , Barbara Plank

"Gold" and "ground truth" human-mediated labels have error. The effects of this error can escape commonly reported metrics of label quality or obscure questions of accuracy, bias, fairness, and usefulness during model evaluation. This study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Michael Hardy

Human label variation (HLV) challenges the standard assumption that a labelled instance has a single ground truth, instead embracing the natural variation in human annotation to train and evaluate models. While various training methods and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Kemal Kurniawan , Meladel Mistica , Timothy Baldwin , Jey Han Lau

The use of machine learning (ML)-based language models (LMs) to monitor content online is on the rise. For toxic text identification, task-specific fine-tuning of these models are performed using datasets labeled by annotators who provide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Kofi Arhin , Ioana Baldini , Dennis Wei , Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy , Moninder Singh

Uncertainty in machine learning models is a timely and vast field of research. In supervised learning, uncertainty can already occur in the first stage of the training process, the annotation phase. This scenario is particularly evident…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Katharina Hechinger , Christoph Koller , Xiao Xiang Zhu , Göran Kauermann

Modeling complex subjective tasks in Natural Language Processing, such as recognizing emotion and morality, is considerably challenging due to significant variation in human annotations. This variation often reflects reasonable differences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Georgios Chochlakis , Peter Wu , Arjun Bedi , Marcus Ma , Kristina Lerman , Shrikanth Narayanan

Human label variation (Plank 2022), or annotation disagreement, exists in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To be robust and trusted, NLP models need to identify such variation and be able to explain it. To this end, we created…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Nan-Jiang Jiang , Chenhao Tan , Marie-Catherine de Marneffe

Today, ground-truth generation uses data sets annotated by cloud-based annotation services. These services rely on human annotation, which can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we consider the problem of hybrid human-machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Hang Qiu , Krishna Chintalapudi , Ramesh Govindan

Speech emotion recognition is an important component of any human centered system. But speech characteristics produced and perceived by a person can be influenced by a multitude of reasons, both desirable such as emotion, and undesirable…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Mimansa Jaiswal , Emily Mower Provost

In machine learning, "ground truth" refers to the assumed correct labels used to train and evaluate models. However, the foundational "ground truth" paradigm rests on a positivistic fallacy that treats human disagreement as technical noise…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sheza Munir , Benjamin Mah , Krisha Kalsi , Shivani Kapania , Julian Posada , Edith Law , Ding Wang , Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed

Many machine learning tasks involve inherent subjectivity, where annotators naturally provide varied labels. Standard practice collapses these label distributions into single labels, aggregating diverse human judgments into point estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Agamdeep Singh , Ashish Tiwari , Hosein Hasanbeig , Priyanshu Gupta

Human label variation, or annotation disagreement, exists in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language inference (NLI). To gain direct evidence of how NLI label variation arises, we build LiveNLI, an English…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Nan-Jiang Jiang , Chenhao Tan , Marie-Catherine de Marneffe

Longstanding data labeling practices in machine learning involve collecting and aggregating labels from multiple annotators. But what should we do when annotators disagree? Though annotator disagreement has long been seen as a problem to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Eve Fleisig , Su Lin Blodgett , Dan Klein , Zeerak Talat
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›