The challenges of supervised machine learning in sociological applications Cover Image

A felügyelt gépi tanulás kihívásai a szociológiai alkalmazásokban
The challenges of supervised machine learning in sociological applications

Author(s): Renáta Németh
Subject(s): Social Sciences
Published by: Debreceni Egyetem Politikatudományi és Szociológiai Intézet
Keywords: supervised machine learning; annotation; crowsourcing; AI bias

Summary/Abstract: The sociological applications of supervised machine learning, already well proven in industrial/ business applications, raise specific questions. The reason for this specificity is that in these applications, the algorithm is tasked with learning complex concepts (e.g. whether a tweet contains hate speech). Supervised learning consists of learning to classify previously annotated (hate speech/non-hate speech) texts by the algorithm, looking for characteristic text patterns. The questions that arise are: how to prepare annotation? How can a hermeneutic challenge such as hate speech recognition be performed by annotators? Are routinely applied, detailed annotation guidelines helpful? The article also discusses how large companies perform coding on crowdsourcing platforms, and describes AI bias, which in this case means that annotators themselves introduce bias into the data. I illustrate these issues with our own research experiences.

  • Issue Year: 10/2021
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 27-42
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: Hungarian
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