Evaluation Guidelines and Annotation Design

~35 min read

Writing evaluation guidelines that produce consistent, high-quality labels at scale.

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Key points

  • Anchor examples per rating level are the most important part of annotation guidelines — abstract descriptions alone produce low IAA
  • Target Cohen's kappa ≥ 0.7 before scaling annotation; refine guidelines if below this
  • Test sets need three source types: curated (known failures), sampled (real distribution), adversarial (edge cases)