2025 EMNLP EMNLP 2025

McMaster at LeWiDi-2025: Demographic-Aware RoBERTa

Abstract

AbstractWe present our submission to the Learning With Disagreements (LeWiDi) 2025 shared task. Our team implemented a variety of BERT-based models that encode annotator meta-data in combination with text to predict soft-label distributions and individual annotator labels. We show across four tasks that a combination of demographic factors leads to improved performance, however through ablations across all demographic variables we find that in some cases, a single variable performs best. Our approach placed 4th in the overall competition.

🌉 Interdisciplinary Bridge — Computer Science and Data Science & Analytics and Deep Learning and Machine Learning
🧭 Keyword Pioneer — soft-label prediction
🐝 Cross-Pollinator — Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Computer Vision, Data Science & Analytics, Deep Learning, Healthcare & Medicine, Interdisciplinary, Knowledge & Reasoning, Machine Learning, Mathematics & Optimization, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Robotics, Security & Privacy, Speech & Audio