Survey Article

Inter-Coder Agreement for Computational Linguistics

Ron Artstein

University of Essex

Massimo Poesio

University of Essex/Universit`a di Trento

This article is a survey of methods for measuring agreement among corpus annotators. It exposes the mathematics and underlying assumptions of agreement coefficients, covering Krippendorff’s alpha as well as Scott’s pi and Cohen’s kappa;discusses the use of coefficients in several annotation tasks;and argues that weighted, alpha-like coefficients, traditionally less used than kappalike measures in computational linguistics, may be more appropriate for many corpus annotation tasks—but that their use makes the interpretation of the value of the coefficient even harder.

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