Beyond Explanation: A Case for Exploratory Text Visualizations of Non-Aggregated, Annotated Datasets

Lucy Havens, Benjamin Bach, Melissa Terras, Beatrice Alex


Abstract
This paper presents an overview of text visualization techniques relevant for data perspectivism, aiming to facilitate analysis of annotated datasets for the datasets’ creators and stakeholders. Data perspectivism advocates for publishing non-aggregated, annotated text data, recognizing that for highly subjective tasks, such as bias detection and hate speech detection, disagreements among annotators may indicate conflicting yet equally valid interpretations of a text. While the publication of non-aggregated, annotated data makes different interpretations of text corpora available, barriers still exist to investigating patterns and outliers in annotations of the text. Techniques from text visualization can overcome these barriers, facilitating intuitive data analysis for NLP researchers and practitioners, as well as stakeholders in NLP systems, who may not have data science or computing skills. In this paper we discuss challenges with current dataset creation practices and annotation platforms, followed by a discussion of text visualization techniques that enable open-ended, multi-faceted, and iterative analysis of annotated data.
Anthology ID:
2022.nlperspectives-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP @LREC2022
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Gavin Abercrombie, Valerio Basile, Sara Tonelli, Verena Rieser, Alexandra Uma
Venue:
NLPerspectives
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
73–82
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlperspectives-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucy Havens, Benjamin Bach, Melissa Terras, and Beatrice Alex. 2022. Beyond Explanation: A Case for Exploratory Text Visualizations of Non-Aggregated, Annotated Datasets. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP @LREC2022, pages 73–82, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Explanation: A Case for Exploratory Text Visualizations of Non-Aggregated, Annotated Datasets (Havens et al., NLPerspectives 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlperspectives-1.10.pdf