The Ecological Fallacy in Annotation: Modelling Human Label Variation
  goes beyond Sociodemographics
Matthias Orlikowski Paul Röttger Philipp Cimiano Dirk Hovy
Many NLP tasks exhibit human label variation, where different annotators give
different labels to the same texts. This variation is known to depend, at least
in part, on the sociodemographics of annotators. Recent research aims to model
individual annotator behaviour rather than predicting aggregated labels, and we
would expect that sociodemographic information is useful for these models. On
the other hand, the ecological fallacy states that aggregate group behaviour,
such as the behaviour of the average female annotator, does not necessarily
explain individual behaviour. To account for sociodemographics in models of
individual annotator behaviour, we introduce group-specific layers to
multi-annotator models. In a series of experiments for toxic content detection,
we find that explicitly accounting for sociodemographic attributes in this way
does not significantly improve model performance. This result shows that
individual annotation behaviour depends on much more than just
sociodemographics.