Inter-rater Agreement on Sentence Formality

Abstract

Formality is one of the most important dimensions of writing style variation. In this study we conducted an inter-rater reliability experiment for assessing sentence formality on a five-point Likert scale, and obtained good agreement results as well as different rating distributions for different sentence categories. We also performed a difficulty analysis to identify the bottlenecks of our rating procedure. Our main objective is to design an automatic scoring mechanism for sentence-level formality, and this study is important for that purpose.