Interrater Disagreement Resolution: A Systematic Procedure to Reach Consensus in Annotation Tasks

AbstractWe present a systematic procedure for interrater disagreement resolution. The procedure is general, but of particular use in multiple-annotator tasks geared towards ground truth construction. We motivate our proposal by arguing that, barring cases in which the researchers’ goal is to elicit different viewpoints, interrater disagreement is a sign of poor quality in the design or the description of a task. Consensus among annotators, we maintain, should be striven for, through a systematic procedure for disagreement resolution such as the one we describe.