In this tutorial, we will show how dimensionality reduction can be applied over both the media units and the annotations of a crowdsourcing task, and how this impacts the results of the CrowdTruth quality metrics. We start with an open-ended extraction task, where the crowd was asked to highlight words or phrases in a text that refer to events or actions. The task was executed on FigureEight. For more crowdsourcing annotation task examples, click here.
To replicate this experiment, the code used to design and implement this crowdsourcing annotation template is available here: template, css, javascript.
This is how the task looked like to the workers:
A sample dataset for this task is available in this file, containing raw output from the crowd on FigureEight. Download the file and place it in a folder named data that has the same root as this notebook. The answers from the crowd are stored in the tagged_events column.
In [17]:
import pandas as pd
test_data = pd.read_csv("../data/event-text-highlight.csv")
test_data["tagged_events"][0:30]
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Notice the diverse behavior of the crowd workers. While most annotated each word individually, the worker on row 2 annotated a chunk of the sentence together in one word phrase. Also, when no answer was picked by the worker, the value in the cell is [NONE].
Our basic pre-processing configuration attempts to normalize the different ways of performing the crowd annotations.
We set remove_empty_rows = False to keep the empty rows from the crowd. This configuration option will set all empty cell values to correspond to a NONE token in the annotation vector.
We build the annotation vector to have one component for each word in the sentence. To do this, we break up multiple-word annotations into a list of single words in the processJudgments call:
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]] = judgments[self.outputColumns[0]].apply(
lambda x: str(x).replace(' ',self.annotation_separator))The final configuration class Config is this:
In [57]:
import crowdtruth
from crowdtruth.configuration import DefaultConfig
class Config(DefaultConfig):
inputColumns = ["doc_id", "sentence_id", "events", "events_count", "original_sententce", "processed_sentence", "tokens"]
outputColumns = ["tagged_events"]
open_ended_task = True
annotation_separator = ","
remove_empty_rows = False
def processJudgments(self, judgments):
# build annotation vector just from words
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]] = judgments[self.outputColumns[0]].apply(
lambda x: str(x).replace(' ',self.annotation_separator))
# normalize vector elements
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]] = judgments[self.outputColumns[0]].apply(
lambda x: str(x).replace('[',''))
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]] = judgments[self.outputColumns[0]].apply(
lambda x: str(x).replace(']',''))
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]] = judgments[self.outputColumns[0]].apply(
lambda x: str(x).replace('"',''))
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]] = judgments[self.outputColumns[0]].apply(
lambda x: str(x).replace(',,,',','))
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]] = judgments[self.outputColumns[0]].apply(
lambda x: str(x).replace(',,',','))
return judgments
Now we can pre-process the data and run the CrowdTruth metrics:
In [58]:
data_with_stopwords, config_with_stopwords = crowdtruth.load(
file = "../data/event-text-highlight.csv",
config = Config()
)
processed_results_with_stopwords = crowdtruth.run(
data_with_stopwords,
config_with_stopwords
)
A more complex dimensionality reduction technique involves removing the stopwords from both the media units and the crowd annotations. Stopwords (i.e. words that are very common in the English language) do not usually contain much useful information. Also, the behavior of the crowds w.r.t them is inconsistent - some workers omit them, some annotate them.
The first step is to build a function that removes stopwords from strings. We will use the stopwords corpus in the nltk package to get the list of words. We want to build a function that can be reused for both the text in the media units and in the annotations column. Also, we need to be careful about omitting punctuation.
The function remove_stop_words does all of these things:
In [59]:
import nltk
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
import string
stopword_set = set(stopwords.words('english'))
stopword_set.update(['s'])
def remove_stop_words(words_string, sep):
'''
words_string: string containing all words
sep: separator character for the words in words_string
'''
words_list = words_string.split(sep)
corrected_words_list = ""
for word in words_list:
if word not in stopword_set:
if corrected_words_list != "":
corrected_words_list += sep
corrected_words_list += word
return corrected_words_list
In the new configuration class ConfigDimRed, we apply the function we just built to both the column that contains the media unit text (inputColumns[2]), and the column containing the crowd annotations (outputColumns[0]):
In [60]:
import pandas as pd
class ConfigDimRed(Config):
def processJudgments(self, judgments):
judgments = Config.processJudgments(self, judgments)
# remove stopwords from input sentence
for idx in range(len(judgments[self.inputColumns[2]])):
judgments.at[idx, self.inputColumns[2]] = remove_stop_words(
judgments[self.inputColumns[2]][idx], " ")
for idx in range(len(judgments[self.outputColumns[0]])):
judgments.at[idx, self.outputColumns[0]] = remove_stop_words(
judgments[self.outputColumns[0]][idx], self.annotation_separator)
if judgments[self.outputColumns[0]][idx] == "":
judgments.at[idx, self.outputColumns[0]] = self.none_token
return judgments
Now we can pre-process the data and run the CrowdTruth metrics:
In [61]:
data_without_stopwords, config_without_stopwords = crowdtruth.load(
file = "../data/event-text-highlight.csv",
config = ConfigDimRed()
)
processed_results_without_stopwords = crowdtruth.run(
data_without_stopwords,
config_without_stopwords
)
In [62]:
%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.scatter(
processed_results_with_stopwords["units"]["uqs"],
processed_results_without_stopwords["units"]["uqs"],
)
plt.plot([0, 1], [0, 1], 'red', linewidth=1)
plt.title("Sentence Quality Score")
plt.xlabel("with stopwords")
plt.ylabel("without stopwords")
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The red line in the plot runs through the diagonal. All sentences above the line have a higher sentence quality score when the stopwords were removed.
The plot shows that removing the stopwords improved the quality for a majority of the sentences. Surprisingly though, some sentences decreased in quality. This effect can be understood when plotting the worker quality scores.
In [63]:
plt.scatter(
processed_results_with_stopwords["workers"]["wqs"],
processed_results_without_stopwords["workers"]["wqs"],
)
plt.plot([0, 0.8], [0, 0.8], 'red', linewidth=1)
plt.title("Worker Quality Score")
plt.xlabel("with stopwords")
plt.ylabel("without stopwords")
Out[63]:
The quality of the majority of workers also has increased in the configuration where we removed the stopwords. However, because of the inter-linked nature of the CrowdTruth quality metrics, the annotations of these workers now has a greater weight when calculating the sentence quality score. So the stopword removal process had the effect of removing some of the noise in the annotations and therefore increasing the quality scores, but also of amplifying the true ambiguity in the sentences.
In [64]:
data_with_stopwords["units"]
Out[64]:
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