Authors Should Label Their Own Documents

Abstract

Third-party annotation is the status quo for labeling text, but egocentric information such as sentiment and belief can at best only be approximated by a third-person proxy. We introduce author labeling, an annotation technique where the writer of the document itself annotates the data at the moment of creation. We collaborate with a commercial chatbot with over 20,000 users to deploy an author labeling annotation system. This system identifies task-relevant queries, generates on-the-fly labeling questions, and records authors' answers in real time. We train and deploy an online-learning model architecture for product recommendation with author-labeled data to improve performance. We train our model to minimize the prediction error on questions generated for a set of predetermined subjective beliefs using author-labeled responses. Our model achieves a 537% improvement in click-through rate compared to an industry advertising baseline running concurrently. We then compare the quality and practicality of author labeling to three traditional annotation approaches for sentiment analysis and find author labeling to be higher quality, faster to acquire, and cheaper. These findings reinforce existing literature that annotations, especially for egocentric and subjective beliefs, are significantly higher quality when labeled by the author rather than a third party. To facilitate broader scientific adoption, we release an author labeling service for the research community at https://academic.echogroup.ai.