Paper ID: 2408.02257

To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate. That is the Question: A Case Study on Annotation Subjectivity in Span Prediction

Kemal Kurniawan, Meladel Mistica, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau

This paper explores the task of automatic prediction of text spans in a legal problem description that support a legal area label. We use a corpus of problem descriptions written by laypeople in English that is annotated by practising lawyers. Inherent subjectivity exists in our task because legal area categorisation is a complex task, and lawyers often have different views on a problem, especially in the face of legally-imprecise descriptions of issues. Experiments show that training on majority-voted spans outperforms training on disaggregated ones.

Submitted: Aug 5, 2024