The Ecological Fallacy in Annotation: Modelling Human Label Variation goes beyond Sociodemographics
Year: 2023

Abstract:
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.

heading: 1 Introduction
text: Different annotators will not necessarily assign the same labels to the same texts, resulting in human label variation (Plank, 2022). Previous work finds that this variation depends at least in part on the sociodemographics of annotators, such as their age and gender (Binns et al., 2017; Al Kuwatly et al., 2020; Excell and Al Moubayed, 2021; Shen and Rose, 2021). These results are particularly pronounced for subjective tasks like toxic content detection (Sap et al., 2019; Kumar et al., 2021; Sap et al., 2022; Goyal et al., 2022). Since human label variation is relevant to a wide range of NLP tasks, recent research has begun to model individual annotator behaviour, rather than predicting aggregated labels (Davani et al., 2022; Gordon et al., 2022). In this setting, we would expect sociodemographic attributes to help explain annotator decisions. Therefore, we investigate whether explicitly
accounting for the sociodemographic attributes of annotators leads to better predictions of their annotation behaviour1.
There is a risk of misreading these efforts as an example of the ecological fallacy: aggregate group behaviour does not necessarily explain individual behaviour (Robinson, 1950; Freedman, 2015). For example, while on average, white annotators may be more likely to label African-American Vernacular English as toxic (Sap et al., 2019), that does not mean it is true for every white annotator individually. However, we aim at exactly this distinction to discuss the relevance of sociodemographic groups in models of individual annotator behaviour. Likewise, we do not assume prior work to commit ecological fallacies, even if a less-nuanced read might suggest it.
Davani et al. (2022) introduce a simple multiannotator model, where each annotator is modelled with a separate classification head. We expand their model with group-specific layers, which are activated for each annotator based on their sociodemographic attributes. We compare the two model setups to a control setup where we randomise group assignments. All comparisons use annotator-level toxicity data from Kumar et al. (2021). We find that find that explicitly accounting for sociodemo-
1Code to run our experiments and analyses is available at https://github.com/morlikowski/ ecological-fallacy
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graphic attributes does not significantly improve model performance. This result suggests that human label variation happens at a more individual level than sociodemographics, and that annotator decisions are even more complex.
Contributions 1) We introduce group-specific layers to model groups of annotators with shared attributes in multi-annotator models. 2) We evaluate the effect of group-specific layers for toxic content detection, and show that explicitly accounting for sociodemographic attributes does not significantly improve performance, thus highlighting the risk of the ecological fallacy in annotator modelling.
As a corollary, we show that multi-annotator models can be applied to many times more annotators than in prior work.

heading: 2 Related Work

heading: Sociodemographics in Annotation Behaviour
text: A growing body of research studies how annotator sociodemographics relate to their annotation decisions, for tasks ranging from natural language inference (Biester et al., 2022) to the detection of racist (Larimore et al., 2021) or generally toxic (Sap et al., 2022) language. Goyal et al. (2022), for example, find that annotators from certain sociodemographic groups (e.g., LGBTQ people) tend to find content attacking their own groups (e.g., homophobic content) to be more toxic. This motivates our research into explicitly accounting for sociodemographics to model annotation behaviour. However, the link between sociodemographics and behaviour is not uncontested. Biester et al. (2022), for example, do not find significant differences in annotation behaviour between annotators of different genders for four different tasks.
Predicting Annotators’ Decisions on Text Different from analyses of annotation behaviour, a recent line of research attempts to learn models based on individual annotations (Plank et al., 2014; Jamison and Gurevych, 2015; Akhtar et al., 2020; Fornaciari et al., 2021; Cercas Curry et al., 2021). These models are motivated by the concern that aggregating labels into a single “truth” is too simplistic for many tasks (Uma et al., 2021; Basile et al., 2021) and might introduce uneven representation of perspectives (Prabhakaran et al., 2021; Abercrombie et al., 2022).
A particular way of learning from disaggregated labels are models that predict individual annotator decisions for an example. Our work builds directly
on such a model, multi-annotator models (Davani et al., 2022), which we describe in more detail separately (§4). Gordon et al. (2022) present a model which also predicts individual annotations and allows a user to interactively aggregate them based on “a jury” inspired by the US judicial system. Their work is similar to ours in central aspects as they explicitly model annotators’ sociodemographics and use the same dataset as we do (Kumar et al., 2021). Different from our work, they frame the task as a regression problem and develop a model based on recommender systems. While they also explore ecological fallacies, they focus on usage risks of their system and countermeasures. In contrast, we consider the issue of the ecological fallacy in modelling annotation behaviour more generally. We compare our findings to their results (§6).

heading: 3 Data
text: We use a sample of the Kumar et al. (2021) dataset for our experiments. The full dataset contains 107,620 English comments from Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan, annotated for toxicity by 17,280 annotators. The annotation process encouraged annotator subjectivity (Röttger et al., 2022) which is a desired feature for modelling annotator behaviour. For each annotator, there is extensive sociodemographic information, collected with a survey. Annotations are given as ratings on a five-point scale which we convert to binary annotations by mapping ratings of 2 to 4 to toxic, and ratings 0 and 1 to non-toxic.
We randomly sample comments from the dataset until we reach annotations from more than 5,000 annotators. We then add all other annotations by these annotators. This approach maximizes the number of examples while controlling the number of annotators in our sample.
Our final sample contains 111,780 annotations from 5,002 annotators on 22,360 comments with 20 to 120 annotations per annotator (mean 22.35). Most comments have five annotations. 20 comments have four because we removed any underage annotators before sampling. In total 78,357 annotations (70.10%) are toxic, and 33,423 annotations (29.90%) are non-toxic.
We focus on four sociodemographic attributes: gender, age, education, and sexual orientation. Group sizes vary by attribute. For gender, 2,450 annotators (48.98%) identify as female, 2,116 (42.30%) as male, 23 (0.46%) as non-binary (rest in residual categories, full statistics in A.1).

heading: 4 Experiments
text: We compare three models. The baseline model is the multi-annotator model by Davani et al. (2022). We use their multi-task variant: For each annotator, there is a separate classification layer trained on annotations from that annotator. All annotator layers share a pre-trained language model used to encode the input. We use RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019) for this, motivated by computational constraints. The other models in our experiments build on this baseline model.
For the sociodemographic models, we add group-specific layers based on sociodemographic attributes of the annotators. A single attribute, e.g., age, implies several groups, e.g., ages 25- 34, ages 35-44. We add the group-specific layers between the pre-trained model and the annotator layers. Each group of annotators shares a separate group-specific layer. We implement group-specific layers as fully-connected, linear layers, each learning a feature transformation applied for one group of annotators.
Finally, for the random models, we shuffle the assignment of annotators to groups from the sociodemographic model, retaining the relative group sizes. In other words, the probability of each annotator staying in the same group or being reassigned to another group corresponds to the relative size of each group. This approach keeps the model architecture constant while removing the connection between actual sociodemographic attributes and group assignment. It allows us to distinguish the effects of additional parameters, which groupspecific layers add in comparison to the baseline, from the effects of sociodemographic information.

heading: 4.1 Evaluation Setup
text: We evaluate all models on individual annotations from gender, age, education, and sexual orientation groups. This setup is comparable to the “individual label” evaluations in Davani et al. (2022) and Gordon et al. (2022), but with scores calculated per group of annotators. We measure performance in macro-average F1, to weigh each class equally.
Cross-Validation As there is no standard split available for our dataset, we perform three iterations of a four-fold cross-validation with different seeds (training details in Appendix A.3). We choose four folds, so that even very small groups have more than a hundred annotations in each test set. Across folds, the numbers of annotations per
sociodemographic group are similar (see Appendix A.4). We construct test sets that only contain comments unseen by the annotators in the training set. We also ensure that all test sets have similar proportions of toxic or non-toxic comments (assigned by the majority of annotators) to address the class imbalance in the dataset (70.62% toxic, see §3).
Statistical Significance We test for statistical significance of our results from multiple runs of k-fold cross-validation via replicability analysis (Dror et al., 2017). We report the number of significant folds and the Bonferroni-corrected count (Dror et al., 2018) in Appendix A.2. We compute the pvalues for each fold via a paired bootstrap-sampling test with BooStSa (Fornaciari et al., 2022). We set the significance level α = 0.05, draw 1000 bootstrap samples per fold, and use a sample size of 50% of the respective test set.
Remarks on Groups Annotators from different groups of the same attribute will in most cases not have annotated the same examples. Therefore, comparisons between models are only meaningful within each group.
The groups modeled via group-specific layers and those in the result tables are always the same. For example, if we report scores for gender groups, then the sociodemographic and randomized models are also based on gender groups. In the following, we focus on a subset of groups, omitting, e.g., "Prefer not to say" (see Appendix A.5).

heading: 5 Results
text: Table 1 shows the results for gender, age, education, and sexual orientation. A naive majority class baseline that predicts all input to be toxic performs worse than all other models with a large margin (exact results in Appendix A.5).
Sociodemographics vs. Baseline Across attributes, the average scores of the sociodemographic model and the baseline are similar. The sociodemographic model often has a slightly higher average macro F1 than the baseline, but no statistically significant gains. Where average performance is better by several points, as for homosexual annotators, this gain is offset by a large variance in performance (a consequence of small group sizes).
Sociodemographics vs. Random We also do not find significant performance differences between sociodemographic group-layer models and the corresponding random group assignment models. For
most groups, the randomized models achieve the highest average scores, but differences to the sociodemographic model are never statistically significant.

heading: 6 Discussion
text: We do not find strong evidence that explicitly modelling sociodemographics helps to predict annotation behaviour with multi-annotator models. These results might seem counter-intuitive, given the evidence of systematic annotation differences between sociodemographic groups (see §2). This discrepancy, however, echoes the issue highlighted by ecological fallacies (Robinson, 1950): Not every annotator will be a perfect representative of their group, so we will not necessarily learn additional information based on their group identity. This seems especially true if we already have access to individual behaviour (i.e., individual annotations).
In contrast to Davani et al. (2022), we made sociodemographic information explicit in our experiments, as one of the factors influencing annotation
behaviour. Group-specific layers can be seen as an inductive bias putting emphasis on the sociodemographic relations between annotators. However, there are potentially many other factors influencing annotation behaviour (e.g., attitudes, moral values, cognitive biases, psychological traits). In light of our results, it seems plausible that multi-annotator models learn about these factors implicitly as part of predicting individual behaviour, so that making one factor explicit does not change prediction quality, at least in the case of sociodemographics.
Still, we also know that generally group attributes can help predict individual decisions, i.e., as base rates or priors. To avoid ecological fallacies in modelling annotation, we therefore need to better understand when and how modelling sociodemographic information is useful in predicting an individual annotator’s decisions. For example, we have only evaluated group-specific layers for single attributes. In contrast, social scientists have long adopted the idea of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), which also informs research on fairness in machine learning (Wang et al., 2022). Intersectionality means that the effect of interactions between sociodemographic attributes enables specific experiences that are not captured by the attributes in isolation. For example, identifying as a man means something different depending on the person’s education. Groups derived from single attributes might simply be too coarse to improve classifiers learnt from individual labels, as in multi-annotator models.
The dataset we use (Kumar et al., 2021) has many characteristics which are ideal for our study (see §3). However, it uses a broad notion of toxicity, in contrast to other studies of toxic language (Larimore et al., 2021; Sap et al., 2022), which match content and analysed groups. When modeling the groups frequently referenced in the datasets themselves, we would expect greater benefits from group-specific layers. Similar to us, Biester et al. (2022) who do not find significant differences between annotators of different genders, do so in a more general setting.
We can only partially compare to Gordon et al. (2022), despite using the same dataset. In addition to differences in approach (see §2), our and their work also differ in their research questions and thus experimental conditions. Gordon et al. (2022) compare their full model (group and individual) against using group information alone.
We compare our full model (group and individual) against using individual information alone. So it is unclear if their model would benefit from group information in comparison to individual-level information alone. While they find an improvement from group information it is only in comparison to a baseline predicting not individual but aggregated labels. Additionally, the composition of test sets sampled from the full dataset differs between the studies: Gordon et al. (2022) use a test set of 5,000 comments, while we use 22,360 comments in a four-fold cross-validation. We leave an explicit comparison to future work.
Group-specific layers (§4) are a natural extension of annotator-specific classification layers in multi-annotator models. However, other architectures to predict annotator-level labels use different ways to represent sociodemographic information, e.g., via embeddings in a recommender system (Gordon et al., 2022). Future work could explore additional representations of annotator attributes (e.g., as part of the input, either textual or as separate features) and other approaches to modelling the relation of individual labeling decisions and attributes (e.g., probabilistic graphical models).

heading: 7 Conclusion
text: We ask how relevant modelling explicit sociodemographic information is in learning from individual annotators. Our experiments with group-specific layers for four sociodemographic attributes on social media data with toxicity annotations (Kumar et al., 2021) show no significant benefit of modelling sociodemographic groups in multi-annotator models. However, as the issue of ecological fallacies highlights, it is not implausible that these models do not learn additional information from group information beyond the inherent variation. However, our results do not refute the usefulness of sociodemographic attributes in modelling annotation, but underscore the importance of their judicious use. Different tasks and model architectures will likely benefit to different extents. Ultimately, annotation behaviour is driven by complex factors and we will need to consider more than annotators’ sociodemographics.

heading: Acknowledgements
text: We thank Deepak Kumar for providing access to the disaggregated dataset and his continued support. We also thank Aida Mostafazadeh Davani for providing information on implementation de-
tails of multi-annotator models. Members of MilaNLP (Bocconi) and the Semantic Computing Group (Bielefeld) provided feedback on earlier versions of this paper, for which we thank them again.
This work has in part been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 949944, INTEGRATOR). Likewise, this work has in part been funded by the VolkswagenStiftung as part of the "3B Bots Building Bridges" project.

heading: Limitations
text: While the dataset by Kumar et al. (2021) enabled us to test models for a range of often overlooked groups (e.g., non-binary or bisexual annotators), we ultimately modelled only four specific attributes (gender, age, education, sexual orientation). There are likely to be more factors that could play a role. Additionally, annotators in the Kumar et al. (2021) dataset are exclusively from the United States of America, so that results do not necessarily hold for other countries or cultures (Hovy and Yang, 2021). Specifically perceptions of harmful content online are known to vary across countries (Jiang et al., 2021).
We used only the (Kumar et al., 2021) dataset. This is mainly due to our strict criteria regarding dataset size and availability of annotator-level labels and sociodemographic information. These characteristics were a prerequisite for our experiments across different attributes with sufficient numbers of annotators. Most datasets which include annotator-level labels and sociodemographic information contain much smaller numbers of annotators and attributes. Nevertheless, with the Measuring Hate Speech Corpus there is at least one additional dataset (Sachdeva et al., 2022) with comparable characteristics that could be used in future experiments. Also, additional small-scale, more focused experiments could use datasets like Sap et al. (2022) or HS-Brexit (Akhtar et al., 2021) which was annotated by 6 annotators, each from one of two sociodemographic groups.
We do not study the aggregation of individual predictions or evaluate against majority labels, as these are not directly relevant to our investigation of sociodemographic attributes in models of annotation behaviour. Consequently, we cannot derive a conclusion about performance in those settings from our results. This is a noteworthy limitation, because part of the experiments introducing
multi-annotator models in Davani et al. (2022) compare labels aggregated from multi-annotator models against predictions from a standard classifier (directly trained on aggregated labels).
For computational reasons, our experiments use a comparatively small pre-trained language model (RoBERTa, Liu et al. 2019). Thus, results might differ with larger models.

heading: Ethics Statement
text: As sociodemographic attributes are sensitive information, we do not infer attributes, but build on a self-reported, IRB-reviewed dataset (Kumar et al., 2021). We also see potential for a discussion of “privacy by design” in modelling human label variation based on our results: There can be circumstances in which knowing more about annotators is not relevant, and indeed might lead to violations of privacy.
As multi-annotator models attempt to capture the preferences of individual annotators, there are valid concerns around privacy and anonymity. As discussed in Davani et al. (2022), increasing the annotator count can be one option to reduce privacy risks. We show it is feasible to learn a model for a large number of individual annotators (5002 vs. 18 and 82 in their work). But a prerequisite for improved privacy is to apply effective aggregation on top of individual predictions, which we do not study in the present work.

heading: A Appendix

heading: A.1 Annotator Sociodemographics in Sample
text: Table 2 shows how many annotators the sample contains. Counts are given per group of the four attributes gender, age, education and sexuality.
In the Kumar et al. (2021) dataset, sociodemographic attributes are given for each individual annotation - not once per annotator. For some annotators, conflicting attribute values exist (e.g., two different age groups). As the data collection spanned several months (Kumar et al., 2021), these value changes can in principle be reasonable (e.g., because an annotator got older, finished a degree, changed sexual preference or gender identity). However, as reasonable changes can not easily be discerned from erroneous input, we disambiguate values based on a heuristic: If an annotator reports several values for an attribute, we assume the most frequent value to be valid. In cases of no clear most frequent value, we set the attribute to "Prefer not to say". Thus, the main results do not contain annotators with ambiguous attributes.

heading: A.2 Significance Tests
text: Results of a replicability analysis (Dror et al., 2017) testing for significant differences in macro F1 on scores from three runs of four-fold cross-validation. Table 3 shows results for a comparison of the sociodemographic models against the baseline models. Table 4 shows results for a comparison of the sociodemographic models against the randomized assignment models. The Bonferroni correction for the corrected count of significant folds k̂Bonferroni is used to account for the fact that we have overlapping test sets from multiple runs of four-fold cross-validation.

heading: A.3 Training Details, Hyperparameters and Computational Resources
text: We implement models and the training loop using the Hugging Face Transformers library (version 4.19.2, Wolf et al. 2020). Maximum sequence length is 512 tokens, with truncation and padding to the maximum length. We train for 3 epochs with a batch size of 8 and an initial learning rate of 0.00001. Otherwise, we used default parameters. We found results to particularly depend on the learning rate, with higher or lower values leading to worse results.
We use a weighted loss function. Label weights are calculated per annotator on the training set of each fold. Label weights, evaluation scores and the four-fold dataset splits (StratifiedKFold) are calculated using the scikit-learn library (version 1.0.2, Pedregosa et al. 2011). The folds are based on a fixed random seed per iteration: 2803636207, 165043843, 2923262358
The majority of parameters in our model belong to the pre-trained language model shared between all group-specific and annotator-specific layers. Specifically, RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019) in the roberta-base variant has 125 Million parameters. We keep the pre-trained model’s default output dimensionality of 768, so that each group-specific layer adds 768 ∗ 768+ 768 = 590, 592 parameters and each annotator layer adds 768 ∗ 2+2 = 1, 538 parameters.
All experiments ran on a single GPU (GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, 12GB GPU RAM). Per fold, training and evaluation together take about three and a half hours in our setting. Three runs of four-fold crossvalidation (12 folds), thus take around 42 hours
(1.75 days). With four attributes and three trainable models the combined run time of the reported experiments is estimated to be 21 days. Including preliminary experiments, which, however, mostly were not full runs of k-fold cross-validation and also utilized DistilBERT (Sanh et al., 2019) with slightly faster run times, it will be many times more. There is no discernible difference in experiment run times between multi-annotator models with or without groups or different numbers of groups.

heading: A.4 Number of Annotations per Group across all Test Sets
text: Table 5 contains the number of annotations we have per group across the total of 12 folds (from three runs of four-fold cross-validation). This number of annotations is the effective test set size per group. As the numbers do not vary substantially, perfor-
mance on each fold is equally representative for all groups.

heading: A.5 Full Results
text: Table 6 shows full results of experiments (see 4), including results for all residual categories and a naive baseline which always predicts toxic.
ACL 2023 Responsible NLP Checklist

heading: A For every submission:

heading: 3 A1. Did you describe the limitations of your work?
text: Limitations, 8

heading: 3 A2. Did you discuss any potential risks of your work?
text: Ethics Statement, 9
3 A3. Do the abstract and introduction summarize the paper’s main claims? 1
7 A4. Have you used AI writing assistants when working on this paper? Left blank.
B 3 Did you use or create scientific artifacts?

heading: 3, Appendix A.3

heading: 3 B1. Did you cite the creators of artifacts you used?
text: 3, Appendix A.3
7 B2. Did you discuss the license or terms for use and / or distribution of any artifacts? Clear from context, citations
7 B3. Did you discuss if your use of existing artifact(s) was consistent with their intended use, provided that it was specified? For the artifacts you create, do you specify intended use and whether that is compatible with the original access conditions (in particular, derivatives of data accessed for research purposes should not be used outside of research contexts)? Clear from context, citations

heading: 3 B4. Did you discuss the steps taken to check whether the data that was collected / used contains any
text: information that names or uniquely identifies individual people or offensive content, and the steps taken to protect / anonymize it? 3, Ethics Statement 9

heading: 3 B5. Did you provide documentation of the artifacts, e.g., coverage of domains, languages, and
text: linguistic phenomena, demographic groups represented, etc.? 3, Appendix A.1
3 B6. Did you report relevant statistics like the number of examples, details of train / test / dev splits, etc. for the data that you used / created? Even for commonly-used benchmark datasets, include the number of examples in train / validation / test splits, as these provide necessary context for a reader to understand experimental results. For example, small differences in accuracy on large test sets may be significant, while on small test sets they may not be. 3, 4, Appendix A.4
C 3 Did you run computational experiments? 4

heading: 3 C1. Did you report the number of parameters in the models used, the total computational budget
text: (e.g., GPU hours), and computing infrastructure used? Appendix A.3
The Responsible NLP Checklist used at ACL 2023 is adopted from NAACL 2022, with the addition of a question on AI writing assistance.
C2. Did you discuss the experimental setup, including hyperparameter search and best-found hyperparameter values? No response.
C3. Did you report descriptive statistics about your results (e.g., error bars around results, summary statistics from sets of experiments), and is it transparent whether you are reporting the max, mean, etc. or just a single run? No response.

heading: 3 C4. If you used existing packages (e.g., for preprocessing, for normalization, or for evaluation), did
text: you report the implementation, model, and parameter settings used (e.g., NLTK, Spacy, ROUGE, etc.)? Appendix A.3
D 7 Did you use human annotators (e.g., crowdworkers) or research with human participants?

heading: Left blank.
text: D1. Did you report the full text of instructions given to participants, including e.g., screenshots, disclaimers of any risks to participants or annotators, etc.? No response.
D2. Did you report information about how you recruited (e.g., crowdsourcing platform, students) and paid participants, and discuss if such payment is adequate given the participants’ demographic (e.g., country of residence)? No response.
D3. Did you discuss whether and how consent was obtained from people whose data you’re using/curating? For example, if you collected data via crowdsourcing, did your instructions to crowdworkers explain how the data would be used? No response.
D4. Was the data collection protocol approved (or determined exempt) by an ethics review board? No response.
D5. Did you report the basic demographic and geographic characteristics of the annotator population that is the source of the data? No response.

heading: Future Work
text: , 2022) with comparable characteristics that could be used in future experiments. Also, additional small-scale, more focused experiments could use datasets like Sap et al. (2022) or HS-Brexit (Akhtar et al. , 2021) which was annotated by 6 annotators, each from one of two sociodemographic groups. We do not study the aggregation of individual predictions or evaluate against majority labels, as these are not directly relevant to our investigation of sociodemographic attributes in models of annotation behaviour