Title
ConStance: Modeling Annotation Contexts to Improve Stance Classification.
Abstract
Manual annotations are a prerequisite for many applications of machine learning. However, weaknesses in the annotation process itself are easy to overlook. In particular, scholars often choose what information to give to annotators without examining these decisions empirically. For subjective tasks such as sentiment analysis, sarcasm, and stance detection, such choices can impact results. Here, for the task of political stance detection on Twitter, we show that providing too little context can result in noisy and uncertain annotations, whereas providing too strong a context may cause it to outweigh other signals. To characterize and reduce these biases, we develop ConStance, a general model for reasoning about annotations across information conditions. Given conflicting labels produced by multiple annotators seeing the same instances with different contexts, ConStance simultaneously estimates gold standard labels and also learns a classifier for new instances. We show that the classifier learned by ConStance outperforms a variety of baselines at predicting political stance, while the modelu0027s interpretable parameters shed light on the effects of each context.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.18653/v1/D17-1116
empirical methods in natural language processing
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1708.06309
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
15
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kenneth Joseph1709.46
Lisa Friedland222515.31
William Hobbs310.68
David Lazer4425.17
Oren Tsur556829.83