From Annotator Agreement to Noise Models

This article discusses the transition from annotated data to a gold standard, that is, a subset that is sufficiently noise-free with high confidence. Unless appropriately reinterpreted, agreement coefficients do not indicate the quality of the data set as a benchmarking resource: High overall agreement is neither sufficient nor necessary to distill some amount of highly reliable data from the annotated material. A mathematical framework is developed that allows estimation of the noise level of the agreed subset of annotated data, which helps promote cautious benchmarking.