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1. Comparing Experts and Novices for AI Data Work: Insights on Allocating Human Intelligence to Design a Conversational Agent

   https://doi.org/10.1609/hcomp.v10i1.21999  

   Sun, Lu; Liu, Yuhan; Joseph, Grace; Yu, Zhou; Zhu, Haiyi; Dow, Steven P. (October 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing)

   Many AI system designers grapple with how best to collect human input for different types of training data. Online crowds provide a cheap on-demand source of intelligence, but they often lack the expertise required in many domains. Experts offer tacit knowledge and more nuanced input, but they are harder to recruit. To explore this trade off, we compared novices and experts in terms of performance and perceptions on human intelligence tasks in the context of designing a text-based conversational agent. We developed a preliminary chatbot that simulates conversations with someone seeking mental health advice to help educate volunteer listeners at 7cups.com. We then recruited experienced listeners (domain experts) and MTurk novice workers (crowd workers) to conduct tasks to improve the chatbot with different levels of complexity. Novice crowds perform comparably to experts on tasks that only require natural language understanding, such as correcting how the system classifies a user statement. For more generative tasks, like creating new lines of chatbot dialogue, the experts demonstrated higher quality, novelty, and emotion. We also uncovered a motivational gap: crowd workers enjoyed the interactive tasks, while experts found the work to be tedious and repetitive. We offer design considerations for allocating crowd workers and experts on input tasks for AI systems, and for better motivating experts to participate in low-level data work for AI. 

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2. From Text to Emotion: Unveiling the Emotion Annotation Capabilities of LLMs

   Niu, Minxue; Jaiswal, Mimansa; Mower_Provost, Emily (September 2024, Interspeech)

   Training emotion recognition models has relied heavily on human annotated data, which present diversity, quality, and cost challenges. In this paper, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, in automating or assisting emotion annotation. We compare GPT-4 with supervised models and/or humans in three aspects: agreement with human annotations, alignment with human perception, and impact on model training. We find that common metrics that use aggregated human annotations as ground truth can underestimate GPT-4's performance, and our human evaluation experiment reveals a consistent preference for GPT-4 annotations over humans across multiple datasets and evaluators. Further, we investigate the impact of using GPT-4 as an annotation filtering process to improve model training. Together, our findings highlight the great potential of LLMs in emotion annotation tasks and underscore the need for refined evaluation methodologies. 

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3. Improve Learning from Crowds via Generative Augmentation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3447548.3467409  

   Zhendong, Chu; Hongning, Wang (August 2021, Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDDConference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’21))

   null (Ed.)

   Crowdsourcing provides an efficient label collection schema for supervised machine learning. However, to control annotation cost, each instance in the crowdsourced data is typically annotated by a small number of annotators. This creates a sparsity issue and limits the quality of machine learning models trained on such data. In this paper, we study how to handle sparsity in crowdsourced data using data augmentation. Specifically, we propose to directly learn a classifier by augmenting the raw sparse annotations. We implement two principles of high-quality augmentation using Generative Adversarial Networks: 1) the generated annotations should follow the distribution of authentic ones, which is measured by a discriminator; 2) the generated annotations should have high mutual information with the ground-truth labels, which is measured by an auxiliary network. Extensive experiments and comparisons against an array of state-of-the-art learning from crowds methods on three real-world datasets proved the effectiveness of our data augmentation framework. It shows the potential of our algorithm for low-budget crowdsourcing in general. 

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4. Supersense and Sensibility: Proxy Tasks for Semantic Annotation of Prepositions

   Gessler, Luke; Wein, Shira; Schneider, Nathan (January 2020, Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop)

   Prepositional supersense annotation is time-consuming and requires expert training. Here, we present two sensible methods for obtaining prepositional supersense annotations indirectly by eliciting surface substitution and similarity judgments. Four pilot studies suggest that both methods have potential for producing prepositional supersense annotations that are comparable in quality to expert annotations. 

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5. Domain-guided Self-supervision of EEG Data Improves Downstream Classification Performance and Generalizability Authors

   Neeraj Wagh, Jionghao Wei (November 2021, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   This paper presents a domain-guided approach for learning representations of scalp-electroencephalograms (EEGs) without relying on expert annotations. Expert labeling of EEGs has proven to be an unscalable process with low inter-reviewer agreement because of the complex and lengthy nature of EEG recordings. Hence, there is a need for machine learning (ML) approaches that can leverage expert domain knowledge without incurring the cost of labor-intensive annotations. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown promise in such settings, although existing SSL efforts on EEG data do not fully exploit EEG domain knowledge. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent SSL models generalize to unseen tasks and datasets. Here we explore whether SSL tasks derived in a domain-guided fashion can learn generalizable EEG representations. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) we propose novel SSL tasks for EEG based on the spatial similarity of brain activity, underlying behavioral states, and age-related differences; 2) we present evidence that an encoder pretrained using the proposed SSL tasks shows strong predictive performance on multiple downstream classifications; and 3) using two large EEG datasets, we show that our encoder generalizes well to multiple EEG datasets during downstream evaluations. 

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