Aligning Intraobserver Agreement by Transitivity

Abstract

Annotation reproducibility and accuracy rely on good consistency within annotators. We propose a novel method for measuring within annotator consistency or annotator Intraobserver Agreement (IA). The proposed approach is based on transitivity, a measure that has been thoroughly studied in the context of rational decision-making. The transitivity measure, in contrast with the commonly used test-retest strategy for annotator IA, is less sensitive to the several types of bias introduced by the test-retest strategy. We present a representation theorem to the effect that relative judgement data that meet transitivity can be mapped to a scale (in terms of measurement theory). We also discuss a further application of transitivity as part of data collection design for addressing the problem of the quadratic complexity of data collection of relative judgements.