Paper
LLMs as Span Annotators: A Comparative Study of LLMs and Humans
Authors
Zdeněk Kasner, Vilém Zouhar, Patrícia Schmidtová, Ivan Kartáč, Kristýna Onderková, Ondřej Plátek, Dimitra Gkatzia, Saad Mahamood, Ondřej Dušek, Simone Balloccu
Abstract
Span annotation - annotating specific text features at the span level - can be used to evaluate texts where single-score metrics fail to provide actionable feedback. Until recently, span annotation was done by human annotators or fine-tuned models. In this paper, we study whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as an alternative to human annotators. We compare the abilities of LLMs to skilled human annotators on three span annotation tasks: evaluating data-to-text generation, identifying translation errors, and detecting propaganda techniques. We show that overall, LLMs have only moderate inter-annotator agreement (IAA) with human annotators. However, we demonstrate that LLMs make errors at a similar rate as skilled crowdworkers. LLMs also produce annotations at a fraction of the cost per output annotation. We release the dataset of over 40k model and human span annotations for further research.