The Many Benefits of Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments

Tyler McDonnell, Mucahid Kutlu, Tamer Elsayed, Matthew Lease

Abstract: When collecting subjective human ratings of items, it can be difficult to measure and enforce data quality due to task subjectivity and lack of insight into how judges arrive at each rating decision. To address this, we propose requiring judges to provide a specific type of rationale underlying each rating decision. We evaluate this approach in the domain of Information Retrieval, where human judges rate the relevance of Webpages. Cost-benefit analysis over 10,000 judgments collected on Mechanical Turk suggests a win-win: experienced crowd workers provide rationales with no increase in task completion time while providing further benefits, including more reliable judgments and greater transparency.