现有垃圾数据过滤方法反而破坏标签多样性,需重新设计以兼顾质量与多样性。
Balancing Quality and Variation: Spam Filtering Distorts Data Label Distributions
- 提出用保守阈值(<5%)筛选标注者,避免过度剔除非垃圾标注者。
- 发现现有方法在主观任务中使标签均值误差上升,因误判真实差异为噪声。
- 揭示垃圾标注者往往不随机,反比真实标注者更固定,传统方法适得其反。
为使机器学习数据集准确反映人群中的多元观点,必须在过滤垃圾或低质回答的同时保留标签多样性。如何平衡标注者可靠性与代表性?我们实证评估了多种标注者过滤启发式方法对主观任务中标签变异性的保持效果。结果表明,这些方法原本针对单一真实标签下的变异视为噪声的场景设计,却常错误剔除持不同意见的正常标注者而非垃圾标注者,导致准确率与标签多样性之间的次优权衡。当标注者剔除率低于5%时表现最佳,之后所有测试方法均使标签真实平均值的均方绝对误差上升。通过合成垃圾数据分析发现,这些方法普遍假设垃圾标注者更具随机性,但实际中多数垃圾标注者与真实标注者分布无法区分,少数可区分者通常给出固定答案而非随机回答。因此,在需保留多样性的任务中,现有垃圾过滤方法的直觉被逆转:垃圾标注者反而比非垃圾标注者更少随机,依赖变异度识别垃圾的方法反而表现更差。这凸显了需发展能兼顾标签多样性的新型垃圾移除方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
For machine learning datasets to accurately represent diverse opinions in a population, they must preserve variation in data labels while filtering out spam or low-quality responses. How can we balance annotator reliability and representation? We empirically evaluate how a range of heuristics for annotator filtering affect the preservation of variation on subjective tasks. We find that these methods, designed for contexts in which variation from a single ground-truth label is considered noise, often remove annotators who disagree instead of spam annotators, introducing suboptimal tradeoffs between accuracy and label diversity. We find that conservative settings for annotator removal (<5%) are best, after which all tested methods increase the mean absolute error from the true average label. We analyze performance on synthetic spam to observe that these methods often assume spam annotators are more random than real spammers tend to be: most spammers are distributionally indistinguishable from real annotators, and the minority that are distinguishable tend to give relatively fixed answers, not random ones. Thus, tasks requiring the preservation of variation reverse the intuition of existing spam filtering methods: spammers tend to be less random than non-spammers, so metrics that assume variation is spam fare worse. These results highlight the need for spam removal methods that account for label diversity.
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