  When constructing models that learn from noisy labels produced by multiple
annotators, it is important to accurately estimate the reliability of
annotators. Annotators may provide labels of inconsistent quality due to their
varying expertise and reliability in a domain. Previous studies have mostly
focused on estimating each annotator's overall reliability on the entire
annotation task. However, in practice, the reliability of an annotator may
depend on each specific instance. Only a limited number of studies have
investigated modelling per-instance reliability and these only considered
binary labels. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised model which can handle
both binary and multi-class labels. It can automatically estimate the
per-instance reliability of each annotator and the correct label for each
instance. We specify our model as a probabilistic model which incorporates
neural networks to model the dependency between latent variables and instances.
For evaluation, the proposed method is applied to both synthetic and real data,
including two labelling tasks: text classification and textual entailment.
Experimental results demonstrate our novel method can not only accurately
estimate the reliability of annotators across different instances, but also
achieve superior performance in predicting the correct labels and detecting the
least reliable annotators compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
