[Lingtyp] complex annotations and inter-rater reliability

Sun Jan 4 16:18:43 UTC 2026

Dear Bjoern — I’m sure that there is no simple answer to your questions. Let me illustrate this with two anecdotal pieces of evidence, which point in somewhat different directions:

I have always insisted in transcribing and annotating recordings (whether texts or the products of structured elicitation tasks) with the assistance of L1 speakers who would verify my judgments (or not). I do this even with material that I as a fluent L2 speaker am perfectly capable of transcribing and annotating by myself. The point is to have someone involved in the task who has the competence to check against my biases as a researcher. You could say that you then have L1 competence and trained analytical competence paired up in a team.

However. There would then be many instances where the consultant would, often without being aware of it, “clean up” an utterance or otherwise produce a different (though of course similar) utterance with the same pragmatic meaning. There would be many instances where I hear something in the recording that the consultant can’t seem to hear, even as I replay over and over. These are experiences most or all fieldworkers are familiar with. Some speakers are better at grasping and sticking to the task of repeating strictly what they hear than others. I strongly suspect that each speaker’s assumptions about the nature of language play a critical role here.

Whenever such a discrepancy arises between what I think I hear and what the consultant tells me they do, we are in epistemological no man’s land. There is arguably no non-compromised solution to this. Even if we eventually achieve consensus, which is obviously the most desirable outcome, this is basically just the result of the consultant coming under the influence of my biases.

One maxim I have always tried to follow is to never transcribe or annotate with the speakers who originally produced the speech sample in question. Arguing with a person over something they said tends to be hopeless in everyday life and doesn’t become anymore productive in a research context.

With all that said, let’s move on to the second scenario. One of my advisees, Tamara Grosso, is currently completing a dissertation on indexicality in ASL. She recorded a mountain of data with two groups of ASL signers and with English speakers as a control group. Now, when talking about sign languages, our notions of ‘L1’ vs. ‘L2’ become quite fraught. For various reasons, most people who use ASL as their primary means of communication have acquired it relatively late and after already having had some exposure to English or other spoken languages though various channels. And this has significant effects on how different signers use the language. For example, the lexicon and grammar of deaf signers who grow up with deaf signing parents have been found to be markedly different from the lexicon and grammar of deaf signers growing up with hearing parents. Hence the two groups of signers Tamara distinguishes in her study design.

Tamara is a certified ASL interpreter. Yet, she decided to have her data transcribed by somebody who grew up with ASL as their dominant language. Tamara coded the data herself, but is currently carrying out an inter-coder reliability study on a subset of the data with another “L1” signer.

What’s my point? Well, the above was mostly meant to illustrate the multitude of variables that can play a role in determining what is the best approach in every given study.

Let me close with a small comment regarding working with historic texts. One method that should not be influenced by biases from knowledge of synchronic varieties of the language is the distributional method, regardless of whether it is carried out with the help of neural networks or merely “manually”, by aggregating information about the contexts in which a given expression occurs and deriving inferences from the result.

Cheers — Juergen

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
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Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
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Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Wiemer, Bjoern via Lingtyp <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Saturday, January 3, 2026 at 06:54
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] complex annotations and inter-rater reliability

Dear All,
since this seems to be the first post on this list this year, I wish everybody a successful, more peaceful and decent year than the previous one.

I want to raise an issue which gets back to a discussion from October 2023 on this list (see the thread below, in inverse chronological order). I’m interested to know whether anybody has a satisfying answer to the question how to deal with semantic annotation, or the annotation of more complex (and less obvious) relations, in particular with the annotation of interclausal relations, both in terms of syntax and in semantic terms. Problems arise already with the coordination-subordination gradient, which ultimately is an outcome of a complex bunch of semantic criteria (like independence of illocutionary force, perspective from which referential expressions like tense or person deixis are interpreted; see also the factors that were analyzed meticulously, e.g., by Verstraete 2007). Other questions concern the coding of clause-initial “particles”: are they just particles, operators of “analytical mood”, or complementizers? (Notably, these things do not exclude one another, but they heavily depend on one’s theory, in particular one’s stance toward complementation and mood.) Another case in point is the annotation of the functions and properties of constructions in TAME-domains, especially if the annotation grid is more fine-grained than mainstream categorizing.
                The problems which I have encountered (in pilot studies) are very similar to those discussed in October 2023 for seemingly even “simpler”, or more coarse-grained annotations. And they aggravate a lot when we turn to data from diachronic corpora: even if being an informed native speaker is usually an asset, with diachronic data this asset is often useless, and native knowledge may be even a hindrance since it leads the analyst to project one’s habits and norms of contemporary usage to earlier stages of the “same” language. (Similar points apply for closely related languages.) I entirely agree that annotators have to be trained, and grids of annotation to be tested, first of all because you have to exclude the (very likely) possibility that raters disagree just because some of the criteria are not clear to at least one of them (with the consequence that you cannot know whether disagreement or low Kappa doesn’t result from misunderstandings, instead of reflecting properties of your object of study). I also agree that each criterion of a grid has to be sufficiently defined, and the annotation grid (or even its “history”) as such be documented in order to save objective criteria for replicability and comparability (for cross-linguistic research, but also for diachronic studies based on a series of “synchronic cuts” of the given language).

On this background, I’d like to formulate the following questions:

  1.  Which arguments are there that (informed) native speakers are better annotators than linguistically well-trained students/linguists who are not native speakers of the respective language(s), but can be considered experts?
  2.  Conversely, which arguments are there that non-native speaker experts might be even better suited as annotators (for this or that kind of issue)?
  3.  Have assumptions about pluses and minuses of both kinds of annotators been tested in practice? That is, do we have empirical evidence for any such assumptions (or do we just rely on some sort of common sense, or on the personal experience of those who have done more complicated annotation work)?
  4.  How can pluses and minuses of both kinds of annotators be counterbalanced in a not too time (and money) consuming way?
  5.  What can we do with data from diachronic corpora if we have to admit that (informed) native speakers are of no use, and non-native experts are not acknowledged, either? Are we just deemed to refrain from any reliable and valid in-depth research based on annotations (and statistics) for diachronically earlier stages and for diachronic change?
  6.  In connection with this, has any cross-linguistic research that is interested in diachrony tried to implement insights from such fields like historical semantics and pragmatics into annotations? In typology, linguistic change has increasingly become more prominent during the last 10-15 years (not only from a macro-perspective). I thus wonder whether typologists have tried to “borrow” methodology from fields that have possibly been better in interpreting diachronic data, and even quantify them (to some extent).

I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but if we have no good answers as for who should be doing annotations – informed native speakers or non-native experts (or only those who are both native and experts)? – and how we might be able to test the validity of annotation grids (for comparisons across time and/or languages), there won’t be convincing arguments how to deal with diachronic data (or data of lesser studied languages for which there might be no native speakers available) in empirical studies that are to disclose more fine-grained distinctions and changes, also in order to quantify them. In particular, reviewers of project applications may always ask for a convincing methodology, and if no such research is funded we’ll remain ignorant of quite many reasons and backgrounds of language change.

I’d appreciate advice, in particular if it provides answers to any of the questions under 1-6 above.

Best,
Björn (Wiemer).

Von: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> Im Auftrag von William Croft
Gesendet: Montag, 16. Oktober 2023 15:52
An: Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de>
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Betreff: Re: [Lingtyp] typology projects that use inter-rater reliability?

An early cross-linguistic study with multiple annotators is this one:

Gundel, Jeannette K., Nancy Hedberg & Ron Zacharski. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69.274-307.

It doesn’t have all the documentation that Volker suggests; our standards for providing documentation has risen.

I have been involved in annotation projects in natural language processing, where the aim is to annotate corpora so that automated methods can “learn” the annotation categories from the “gold standard” (i.e. “expert”) annotation -- this is supervised learning in NLP. Recent efforts are aiming at developing a single annotation scheme for use across languages, such as Universal Dependencies (for syntactic annotation), Uniform Meaning Representation (for semantic annotation), and Unimorph (for morphological annotation). My experience is somewhat similar to Volker’s: even when the annotation scheme is very coarse-grained (from a theoretical linguist’s point of view), getting good enough interannotator agreement is hard, even when the annotators are the ones who designed the scheme, or are native speakers or have done fieldwork on the language. I would add to Volker’s comments that one has to be trained for annotation; but that training can introduce (mostly implicit) bases, at least in the eyes of proponents of a different theoretical approach -- something that is more apparent in a field such as linguistics where there are large differences in theoretical approaches.

Bill

On Oct 16, 2023, at 6:02 AM, Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de<mailto:volker.gast at uni-jena.de>> wrote:

Hey Adam (and others),

I think you could phrase the question differently: What typological studies have been carried out with multiple annotators and careful documentation of the annotation process, including precise annotation guidelines, the training of the annotators, publication of all the (individual) annotations, calculation of inter-annotator agreement etc.?

I think there are very few. The reason is that the process is very time-consuming, and "risky". I was a member of a project co-directed with Vahram Atayan (Heidelberg) where we carried out very careful annotations dealing with what we call 'adverbials of immediate posteriority' (see the references below). Even though we only dealt with a few well-known European languages, it took us quite some time to develop annotation guidelines and train annotators. The inter-rater agreement was surprisingly low even for categories that appeared straightforward to us, e.g. agentivity of a predicate; and we were dealing with well-known languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian). So the outcomes of this process were very moderate in comparison with the work that went into the annotations. (Note that the project was primarily situated in the field of contrastive linguistics and translation studies, not linguistic typology, but the challenges are the same).

It's a dilemma: as a field, we often fail to meet even the most basic methodological requirements that are standardly made in other fields (most notably psychology). I know of at least two typological projects where inter-rater agreement tests were run, but the results were so poor that a decision was made to not pursue this any further (meaning, the projects were continued, but without inter-annotator agreement tests; that's what makes annotation projects "risky": what do you do if you never reach a satisfactory level of inter-annotator agreement?). Most annotation projects, including some of my own earlier work, are based on what we euphemistically call 'expert annotation', with 'expert' referring to ourselves, the authors. Today I would minimally expect the annotations to be done by someone who is not an author, and I try to implement that requirement in my role as a journal editor (Linguistics), but it's hard. We do want to see more empirical work published, and if the methodological standards are too high, we will end publishing nothing at all.

I'd be very happy if there were community standards for this, and I'd like to hear about any iniatives implementing more rigorous methodological standards in lingusitic typology. Honestly, I wouldn't know what to require. But it seems clear to me that we cannot simply go on like this, annotating our own data, which we subsequently analyze, as it is well known that annotation decisions are influenced by (mostly implicit) biases.

Best,
Volker

Gast, Volker & Vahram Atayan (2019). 'Adverbials of immediate posteriority in French and German: A contrastive corpus study of tout de suite, immédiatement, gleich and sofort'. In Emonds, J., M. Janebová & L. Veselovská (eds.): Language Use and Linguistic Structure. Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2018, 403-430. Olomouc Modern Lanuage Series. Olomouc: Palacký University Olomouc.

in German:

Atayan, V., B. Fetzer, V. Gast, D. Möller, T. Ronalter (2019). 'Ausdrucksformen der unmittelbaren Nachzeitigkeit in Originalen und Übersetzungen: Eine Pilotstudie zu den deutschen Adverbien gleich und sofort und ihren Äquivalenten im Französischen, Italienischen, Spanischen und Englischen'. In Ahrens, B., S. Hansen-Schirra, M. Krein-Kühle, M. Schreiber, U. Wienen (eds.): Translation -- Linguistik -- Semiotik, 11-82. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Gast, V., V. Atayan, J. Biege, B. Fetzer, S. Hettrich, A. Weber (2019). 'Unmittelbare Nachzeitigkeit im Deutschen und Französischen: Eine Studie auf Grundlage des OpenSubtitles-Korpus'. In Konecny, C., C. Konzett, E. Lavric, W. Pöckl (eds.): Comparatio delectat III. Akten der VIII. Internationalen Arbeitstagung zum romanisch-deutschen und innerromanischen Sprachvergleich, 223-249. Frankfurt: Lang.

---
Prof. V. Gast
https://linktype.iaa.uni-jena.de/VG

On Sat, 14 Oct 2023, Adam James Ross Tallman wrote:

Hello all,
I am gathering a list of projects / citations / papers that use or refer to inter-rater reliability. So far I have.
Himmelmann et al. On the universality of intonational phrases: a cross-linguistic interrater study. Phonology 35.
Gast & Koptjevskaja-Tamm. 2022. Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon. Linguistic Typology (not explicitly the topic of the paper, but interrater reliability metrics are used)
I understand people working with Grambank have used it, but I don't know if there is a publication on that.
best,
Adam
--
Adam J.R. Tallman
Post-doctoral Researcher
Friedrich Schiller Universität
Department of English Studies
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