CrowdWorkSheets: Accounting for Individual and Collective Identities Underlying Crowdsourced Dataset Annotation

TL;DR

This paper highlights ethical issues in crowdsourced dataset annotation, emphasizing individual and collective identities, and introduces CrowdWorkSheets, a framework for transparent documentation of annotation processes.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive survey of ethical considerations and proposes CrowdWorkSheets, a novel framework for transparent documentation in crowdsourced data annotation.

Findings

Identifies key ethical challenges in crowdsourced annotation.

Synthesizes insights on annotator identity and platform relationships.

Introduces a framework for transparent annotation documentation.

Abstract

Human annotated data plays a crucial role in machine learning (ML) research and development. However, the ethical considerations around the processes and decisions that go into dataset annotation have 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 introduce a novel framework, CrowdWorkSheets, for dataset developers to facilitate transparent documentation of key decisions points at various stages of the data annotation pipeline: task formulation, selection of annotators, platform and infrastructure choices, dataset analysis and evaluation, and dataset release and maintenance.