Lining Zhang

To prevent the costly and inefficient use of resources on low-quality annotations, we want a method for creating a pool of dependable annotators who can effectively complete difficult tasks, such as evaluating automatic summarization. Thus, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality Amazon Mechanical Turk workers via a two-step pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out subpar workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-agreement annotations with similar constraints on resources. Although our workers demonstrate a strong consensus among themselves and CloudResearch workers, their alignment with expert judgments on a subset of the data is not as expected and needs further training in correctness. This paper still serves as a best practice for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.

Metrics for Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA), like Cohen’s Kappa, are crucial for validating annotated datasets. Although high agreement is often used to show the reliability of annotation procedures, it is insufficient to ensure or reproducibility. While researchers are encouraged to increase annotator agreement, this can lead to specific and tailored annotation guidelines. We hypothesize that this may result in diverging annotations from different groups. To study this, we first propose the Lee et al. Protocol (LEAP), a standardized and codified annotation protocol. LEAP strictly enforces transparency in the annotation process, which ensures reproducibility of annotation guidelines. Using LEAP to annotate a dialog dataset, we empirically show that while research groups may create reliable guidelines by raising agreement, this can cause divergent annotations across different research groups, thus questioning the validity of the annotations. Therefore, we caution NLP researchers against using reliability as a proxy for reproducibility and validity.

The MALACH corpus contains approximately 375 hours of Holocaust survivor testimonies along with transcripts (for approximately half the data) and audio. It is an extremely difficult corpus for speech recognition, encompassing accented, emotional speech, in many cases from elderly survivors. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made on speech recognition on MALACH with WERs now typically hovering at a 20% level for hybrid speech recognition systems. The purpose of this paper is to examine if recent developments in end-to-end architectures and pretraining with self-supervision continue to drive down performance as they do on popular read corpora such as Librispeech. We also experiment with leveraging the large fraction of unlabeled corpus data by extracting pseudolabels produced from previously trained systems. It is found that the best system-a fine-tuned wav2vec2 system trained on labeled and pseudolabeled data - achieves a WER of 13.5%, a huge gain in performance.

GPT-3 has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. However, it is still unclear what GPT-3 has understood or learned especially in linguistic knowledge. Some studies have shown linguistic phenomena including negation and tense are hard to be recognized by language models such as BERT. In this study, we conduct probing tasks focusing on semantic information. Specifically, we investigate GPT-3’s linguistic knowledge on semantic tasks to identify tense, the number of subjects, and the number of objects for a given sentence. We also experiment with different prompt designs and temperatures of the decoding method. Our experiment results suggest that GPT-3 has acquired linguistic knowledge to identify certain semantic information in most cases, but still fails when there are some types of disturbance happening in the sentence. We also perform error analysis to summarize some common types of mistakes that GPT-3 has made when dealing with certain semantic information.