Whose Ground Truth? Accounting for Individual and Collective Identities Underlying Dataset Annotation
This addresses ethical issues in dataset creation for ML researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing insights rather than introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of ethical considerations in crowdsourced dataset annotation for machine learning, surveying literature to identify challenges related to annotator identity and platform relationships, and provides recommendations for dataset developers across the ML data pipeline.
Human annotations play a crucial role in machine learning (ML) research and development. However, the ethical considerations around the processes and decisions that go into building ML datasets has not received nearly enough attention. In this paper, we survey an array of literature that provides insights into ethical considerations around crowdsourced dataset annotation. We synthesize these insights, and lay out the challenges in this space along two layers: (1) who the annotator is, and how the annotators' lived experiences can impact their annotations, and (2) the relationship between the annotators and the crowdsourcing platforms and what that relationship affords them. Finally, we put forth a concrete set of recommendations and considerations for dataset developers at various stages of the ML data pipeline: task formulation, selection of annotators, platform and infrastructure choices, dataset analysis and evaluation, and dataset documentation and release.