Investigating Annotator Bias with a Graph-Based Approach

A challenge that many online platforms face is hate speech or any other form of online abuse. To cope with this, hate speech detection systems are developed based on machine learning to reduce manual work for monitoring these platforms. Unfortunately, machine learning is vulnerable to unintended bias in training data, which could have severe consequences, such as a decrease in classification performance or unfair behavior (e.g., discriminating minorities). In the scope of this study, we want to investigate annotator bias — a form of bias that annotators cause due to different knowledge in regards to the task and their subjective perception. Our goal is to identify annotation bias based on similarities in the annotation behavior from annotators. To do so, we build a graph based on the annotations from the different annotators, apply a community detection algorithm to group the annotators, and train for each group classifiers whose performances we compare. By doing so, we are able to identify annotator bias within a data set. The proposed method and collected insights can contribute to developing fairer and more reliable hate speech classification models.