@article{TEXTUAL, recid = {10217}, author = {Rzhetsky, Andrey and Shatkay, Hagit and Wilbur, W. John}, title = {How to Get the Most out of Your Curation Effort}, journal = {PLOS Computational Biology}, address = {2009-05-22}, number = {TEXTUAL}, abstract = {<p>Large-scale annotation efforts typically involve several experts who may disagree with each other. We propose an approach for modeling disagreements among experts that allows providing each annotation with a confidence value (i.e., the posterior probability that it is correct). Our approach allows computing certainty-level for individual annotations, given annotator-specific parameters estimated from data. We developed two probabilistic models for performing this analysis, compared these models using computer simulation, and tested each model's actual performance, based on a large data set generated by human annotators specifically for this study. We show that even in the worst-case scenario, when all annotators disagree, our approach allows us to significantly increase the probability of choosing the correct annotation. Along with this publication we make publicly available a corpus of 10,000 sentences annotated according to several cardinal dimensions that we have introduced in earlier work. The 10,000 sentences were all 3-fold annotated by a group of eight experts, while a 1,000-sentence subset was further 5-fold annotated by five new experts. While the presented data represent a specialized curation task, our modeling approach is general; most data annotation studies could benefit from our methodology.</p>}, url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/10217}, }