new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Sep 4

Data Annotation as Measurement

Modern AI systems depend on annotated data, but annotation is rarely treated as the act of measurement that it is. Instead, annotation quality is commonly reduced to agreement: if multiple annotators assign the same annotation to a data instance, the annotations are taken to be high-quality. Yet agreement does not establish whether annotations validly capture the underlying concept they are meant to represent. In this paper, we argue that data annotation should be understood as a measurement problem. Like other forms of measurement, annotation requires defining a concept, operationalizing it through an instrument, applying that instrument, and evaluating the reliability and validity of the resulting measurements. Drawing on a literature review of annotation quality research (N=132) and semi-structured interviews with annotation team members (N=10), we develop a framework for diagnosing and correcting annotation issues. First, we map key decision points across annotation processes - including task design, annotator management, quality assessment, quality improvement, and adjudication - that shape annotation outcomes. Second, we identify five distinct sources of annotation issues: error, ambiguity, impossibility, subjectivity, and annotator identity. Annotation problems that appear similar at the level of outcomes often require different process-level interventions based on their sources. Finally, we translate measurement theory into practical guidance for annotation teams, showing how assessments of reliability and validity can move beyond agreement alone. By reframing annotation as measurement, we offer a conceptual foundation for improving the quality of annotated data used in AI research and practice.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 6

Who Annotates in NLP? A Large-scale Assessment of Human Annotation Reporting between 2018 and 2025

Human annotation is the empirical foundation of much NLP research, from dataset construction to model evaluation, but papers often leave unclear who produced the annotations and how the annotation process was controlled. We provide the first large-scale, task-level audit of human annotation reporting across major NLP venues, asking which annotation details are documented, which are missing, and how reporting varies across time, topic, venue, and intended use of human judgment. We introduce a unified taxonomy of annotation-reporting practices and validate an LLM-assisted extraction pipeline against Annotated-gold, a human-adjudicated gold standard of 41 papers and 72 annotation tasks, where the best model reaches human-comparable agreement with adjudicated labels, with Krippendorff's alpha of 0.606 versus 0.585 for human-human agreement. Using this pipeline, we construct Annotated-llm, a dataset covering ACL-venue papers from 2018-2025, with 2,667 extracted annotation tasks from 1,603 papers, and find that papers frequently report operational details such as recruitment strategies, annotator expertise, and annotation volume, but often omit details needed to assess annotation validity, including training, language proficiency, compensation, socio-demographics, adjudication, and agreement values, especially in model-evaluation studies. Our results show that annotation reporting in NLP has improved over time but remains uneven, and they establish a scalable framework and bare-minimum reporting recommendations for making human annotation more reliable, reproducible, and interpretable.

LongT2IBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Long Text-to-Image Generation with Graph-structured Annotations

The increasing popularity of long Text-to-Image (T2I) generation has created an urgent need for automatic and interpretable models that can evaluate the image-text alignment in long prompt scenarios. However, the existing T2I alignment benchmarks predominantly focus on short prompt scenarios and only provide MOS or Likert scale annotations. This inherent limitation hinders the development of long T2I evaluators, particularly in terms of the interpretability of alignment. In this study, we contribute LongT2IBench, which comprises 14K long text-image pairs accompanied by graph-structured human annotations. Given the detail-intensive nature of long prompts, we first design a Generate-Refine-Qualify annotation protocol to convert them into textual graph structures that encompass entities, attributes, and relations. Through this transformation, fine-grained alignment annotations are achieved based on these granular elements. Finally, the graph-structed annotations are converted into alignment scores and interpretations to facilitate the design of T2I evaluation models. Based on LongT2IBench, we further propose LongT2IExpert, a LongT2I evaluator that enables multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to provide both quantitative scores and structured interpretations through an instruction-tuning process with Hierarchical Alignment Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the proposed LongT2IExpert in alignment evaluation and interpretation. Data and code have been released in https://welldky.github.io/LongT2IBench-Homepage/.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

Challenges and Considerations in Annotating Legal Data: A Comprehensive Overview

The process of annotating data within the legal sector is filled with distinct challenges that differ from other fields, primarily due to the inherent complexities of legal language and documentation. The initial task usually involves selecting an appropriate raw dataset that captures the intricate aspects of legal texts. Following this, extracting text becomes a complicated task, as legal documents often have complex structures, footnotes, references, and unique terminology. The importance of data cleaning is magnified in this context, ensuring that redundant information is eliminated while maintaining crucial legal details and context. Creating comprehensive yet straightforward annotation guidelines is imperative, as these guidelines serve as the road map for maintaining uniformity and addressing the subtle nuances of legal terminology. Another critical aspect is the involvement of legal professionals in the annotation process. Their expertise is valuable in ensuring that the data not only remains contextually accurate but also adheres to prevailing legal standards and interpretations. This paper provides an expanded view of these challenges and aims to offer a foundational understanding and guidance for researchers and professionals engaged in legal data annotation projects. In addition, we provide links to our created and fine-tuned datasets and language models. These resources are outcomes of our discussed projects and solutions to challenges faced while working on them.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 5, 2024

EcoVerse: An Annotated Twitter Dataset for Eco-Relevance Classification, Environmental Impact Analysis, and Stance Detection

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 7, 2024

IndiaFinBench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Model Performance on Indian Financial Regulatory Text

We introduce IndiaFinBench, to our knowledge the first publicly available evaluation benchmark for assessing large language model (LLM) performance on Indian financial regulatory text. Existing financial NLP benchmarks draw exclusively from Western financial corpora (SEC filings, US earnings reports, and English-language financial news), leaving a significant gap in coverage of non-Western regulatory frameworks. IndiaFinBench addresses this gap with 406 expert-annotated question-answer pairs drawn from 192 documents sourced from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), spanning four task types: regulatory interpretation (174 items), numerical reasoning (92 items), contradiction detection (62 items), and temporal reasoning (78 items). Annotation quality is validated through a model-based secondary pass (kappa=0.918 on contradiction detection) and a 60-item human inter-annotator agreement evaluation (kappa=0.611; 76.7% overall agreement). We evaluate twelve models under zero-shot conditions, with accuracy ranging from 70.4% (Gemma 4 E4B) to 89.7% (Gemini 2.5 Flash). All models substantially outperform a non-specialist human baseline of 60.0%. Numerical reasoning is the most discriminative task, with a 35.9 percentage-point spread across models. Bootstrap significance testing (10,000 resamples) reveals three statistically distinct performance tiers. The dataset, evaluation code, and all model outputs are available at https://github.com/rajveerpall/IndiaFinBench

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 20

Malaysian English News Decoded: A Linguistic Resource for Named Entity and Relation Extraction

Standard English and Malaysian English exhibit notable differences, posing challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks on Malaysian English. Unfortunately, most of the existing datasets are mainly based on standard English and therefore inadequate for improving NLP tasks in Malaysian English. An experiment using state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) solutions on Malaysian English news articles highlights that they cannot handle morphosyntactic variations in Malaysian English. To the best of our knowledge, there is no annotated dataset available to improvise the model. To address these issues, we constructed a Malaysian English News (MEN) dataset, which contains 200 news articles that are manually annotated with entities and relations. We then fine-tuned the spaCy NER tool and validated that having a dataset tailor-made for Malaysian English could improve the performance of NER in Malaysian English significantly. This paper presents our effort in the data acquisition, annotation methodology, and thorough analysis of the annotated dataset. To validate the quality of the annotation, inter-annotator agreement was used, followed by adjudication of disagreements by a subject matter expert. Upon completion of these tasks, we managed to develop a dataset with 6,061 entities and 3,268 relation instances. Finally, we discuss on spaCy fine-tuning setup and analysis on the NER performance. This unique dataset will contribute significantly to the advancement of NLP research in Malaysian English, allowing researchers to accelerate their progress, particularly in NER and relation extraction. The dataset and annotation guideline has been published on Github.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 22, 2024

AutoGUI: Scaling GUI Grounding with Automatic Functionality Annotations from LLMs

User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation. However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale. In this work, we propose the pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor. We construct an -704k dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets. Human evaluation shows that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our -704k dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://autogui-project.github.io/.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

Automotive Perception Software Development: An Empirical Investigation into Data, Annotation, and Ecosystem Challenges

Software that contains machine learning algorithms is an integral part of automotive perception, for example, in driving automation systems. The development of such software, specifically the training and validation of the machine learning components, require large annotated datasets. An industry of data and annotation services has emerged to serve the development of such data-intensive automotive software components. Wide-spread difficulties to specify data and annotation needs challenge collaborations between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and their suppliers of software components, data, and annotations. This paper investigates the reasons for these difficulties for practitioners in the Swedish automotive industry to arrive at clear specifications for data and annotations. The results from an interview study show that a lack of effective metrics for data quality aspects, ambiguities in the way of working, unclear definitions of annotation quality, and deficits in the business ecosystems are causes for the difficulty in deriving the specifications. We provide a list of recommendations that can mitigate challenges when deriving specifications and we propose future research opportunities to overcome these challenges. Our work contributes towards the on-going research on accountability of machine learning as applied to complex software systems, especially for high-stake applications such as automated driving.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2023

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 16

Position: Early-Stage Quality Assurance in Annotation Pipelines Is More Cost-Effective Than Late-Stage Validation

This position paper argues that the machine learning community should prioritize early-stage quality assurance in annotation pipelines over the prevailing practice of late-stage validation. Data quality bottlenecks increasingly limit foundation model improvement, yet quality assurance research focuses almost exclusively on validation methods rather than validation timing. When validation occurs, not merely what methods are employed, fundamentally determines both error rates and annotation costs. This temporal neglect is puzzling given the well-established "shift-left" principle from software engineering, where empirical studies demonstrate 4--100x cost multipliers for defects detected in later stages (Boehm, 1981; Shull et al., 2002). Annotation pipelines exhibit analogous dynamics: errors caught before annotation begins cost a fraction of those discovered after review cycles complete. We propose a taxonomy of three QA trigger points, namely pre-annotation (T0), post-annotation (T1), and post-review (T2), that decompose annotation workflows into discrete validation opportunities. A parametric error-propagation model formalizes when timing affects final error rates versus only economics, making timing a measurable design variable rather than a configuration afterthought. A survey of 47 recent papers reveals that only 4% report when validation occurs, a striking gap given timing's demonstrated impact in adjacent fields. Without explicit attention to QA timing, the community risks optimizing validation methods while ignoring the structural variable that may matter most. Acting on this position requires three steps: researchers should report QA timing configurations alongside validation methods; annotation platforms should expose timing as a first-class parameter; and the community should run controlled experiments that measure stage-specific detection rates directly.

  • 11 authors
·
May 14

Yor-Sarc: A gold-standard dataset for sarcasm detection in a low-resource African language

Sarcasm detection poses a fundamental challenge in computational semantics, requiring models to resolve disparities between literal and intended meaning. The challenge is amplified in low-resource languages where annotated datasets are scarce or nonexistent. We present Yor-Sarc, the first gold-standard dataset for sarcasm detection in Yorùbá, a tonal Niger-Congo language spoken by over 50 million people. The dataset comprises 436 instances annotated by three native speakers from diverse dialectal backgrounds using an annotation protocol specifically designed for Yorùbá sarcasm by taking culture into account. This protocol incorporates context-sensitive interpretation and community-informed guidelines and is accompanied by a comprehensive analysis of inter-annotator agreement to support replication in other African languages. Substantial to almost perfect agreement was achieved (Fleiss' κ= 0.7660; pairwise Cohen's κ= 0.6732--0.8743), with 83.3% unanimous consensus. One annotator pair achieved almost perfect agreement (κ= 0.8743; 93.8% raw agreement), exceeding a number of reported benchmarks for English sarcasm research works. The remaining 16.7% majority-agreement cases are preserved as soft labels for uncertainty-aware modelling. Yor-Sarchttps://github.com/toheebadura/yor-sarc is expected to facilitate research on semantic interpretation and culturally informed NLP for low-resource African languages.

Pervasive Annotation Errors Break Text-to-SQL Benchmarks and Leaderboards

Researchers have proposed numerous text-to-SQL techniques to streamline data analytics and accelerate the development of data-driven applications. To compare these techniques and select the best one for deployment, the community depends on public benchmarks and their leaderboards. Since these benchmarks heavily rely on human annotations during question construction and answer evaluation, the validity of the annotations is crucial. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study that (i) benchmarks annotation error rates for two widely used text-to-SQL benchmarks, BIRD and Spider 2.0-Snow, and (ii) corrects a subset of the BIRD development (Dev) set to measure the impact of annotation errors on text-to-SQL agent performance and leaderboard rankings. Through expert analysis, we show that BIRD Mini-Dev and Spider 2.0-Snow have error rates of 52.8% and 62.8%, respectively. We re-evaluate all 16 open-source agents from the BIRD leaderboard on both the original and the corrected BIRD Dev subsets. We show that performance changes range from -7% to 31% (in relative terms) and rank changes range from -9 to +9 positions. We further assess whether these impacts generalize to the full BIRD Dev set. We find that the rankings of agents on the uncorrected subset correlate strongly with those on the full Dev set (Spearman's r_s=0.85, p=3.26e-5), whereas they correlate weakly with those on the corrected subset (Spearman's r_s=0.32, p=0.23). These findings show that annotation errors can significantly distort reported performance and rankings, potentially misguiding research directions or deployment choices. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/text_to_sql_benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 13

FiNERweb: Datasets and Artifacts for Scalable Multilingual Named Entity Recognition

Recent multilingual named entity recognition (NER) work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can provide effective synthetic supervision, yet such datasets have mostly appeared as by-products of broader experiments rather than as systematic, reusable resources. We introduce FiNERweb, a dataset-creation pipeline that scales the teacher-student paradigm to 91 languages and 25 scripts. Building on FineWeb-Edu, our approach trains regression models to identify NER-relevant passages and annotates them with multilingual LLMs, resulting in about 225k passages with 235k distinct entity labels. Our experiments show that the regression model achieves more than 84 F1, and that models trained on FiNERweb obtain comparable or improved performance in zero shot transfer settings on English, Thai, and Swahili, despite being trained on 19x less data than strong baselines. In addition, we assess annotation quality using LLM-as-a-judge and observe consistently high scores for both faithfulness (3.99 out of 5) and completeness (4.05 out of 5), indicating reliable and informative annotations. Further, we release the dataset with both English labels and translated label sets in the respective target languages because we observe that the performance of current state-of-the-art models drops by 0.02 to 0.09 F1 when evaluated using target language labels instead of English ones. We release FiNERweb together with all accompanying artifacts to the research community in order to facilitate more effective student-teacher training for multilingual named entity recognition.

flair flair
·
Dec 15, 2025 2

Author Once, Publish Everywhere: Portable Metadata Authoring with the CEDAR Embeddable Editor

High-quality, "rich" metadata are essential for making research data findable, interoperable, and reusable. The Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) has long addressed this need by providing tools to design machine-actionable metadata templates that encode community standards in a computable form. To make these capabilities more accessible within real-world research workflows, we have developed the CEDAR Embeddable Editor (CEE)-a lightweight, interoperable Web Component that brings structured, standards-based metadata authoring directly into third-party platforms. The CEE dynamically renders metadata forms from machine-actionable templates and produces semantically rich metadata in JSON-LD format. It supports ontology-based value selection via the BioPortal ontology repository, and it includes external authority resolution for persistent identifiers such as ORCIDs for individuals and RORs for research organizations. Crucially, the CEE requires no custom user-interface development, allowing deployment across diverse platforms. The CEE has been successfully integrated into generalist scientific data repositories such as Dryad and the Open Science Framework, demonstrating its ability to support discipline-specific metadata creation. By supporting the embedding of metadata authoring within existing research environments, the CEE can facilitate the adoption of community standards and help improve metadata quality across scientific disciplines.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 16, 2025

Computer Science Named Entity Recognition in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Domain-specific named entity recognition (NER) on Computer Science (CS) scholarly articles is an information extraction task that is arguably more challenging for the various annotation aims that can beset the task and has been less studied than NER in the general domain. Given that significant progress has been made on NER, we believe that scholarly domain-specific NER will receive increasing attention in the years to come. Currently, progress on CS NER -- the focus of this work -- is hampered in part by its recency and the lack of a standardized annotation aim for scientific entities/terms. This work proposes a standardized task by defining a set of seven contribution-centric scholarly entities for CS NER viz., research problem, solution, resource, language, tool, method, and dataset. Following which, its main contributions are: combines existing CS NER resources that maintain their annotation focus on the set or subset of contribution-centric scholarly entities we consider; further, noting the need for big data to train neural NER models, this work additionally supplies thousands of contribution-centric entity annotations from article titles and abstracts, thus releasing a cumulative large novel resource for CS NER; and, finally, trains a sequence labeling CS NER model inspired after state-of-the-art neural architectures from the general domain NER task. Throughout the work, several practical considerations are made which can be useful to information technology designers of the digital libraries.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 28, 2022

AISE-Bench: A Full-Cycle Curated Benchmark for Information Seeking on Academic Knowledge Graphs

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with tools are emerging as autonomous agents capable of using Web engine, APIs, and code to solve complex, long-horizon tasks. Current tool-using benchmarks for information seeking on academic graphs rely on synthetic templates, simplified solution spaces, or narrow tasks such as paper-centric tasks, leaving key challenges underexplored - realistic user intent, complex multi-step API planning, rich parameter filling for APIs, grounded answers with references, and comprehensive evaluation of both the process and the outcome. We introduce AISE-Bench, a real-world, full-cycle annotated benchmark for information seeking on academic knowledge graphs. AISE-Bench release contains 1,133 QA pairs, including query taxonomies, full API execution trajectories, validated parameters, and source-grounded answers with reference links. To support high-quality annotation, we design a customized agent workflow to enable annotators to plan, execute, and revise complex API workflows efficiently. We develop a comprehensive evaluation protocol measuring answer quality, reference grounding, API-planning correctness, and execution success. Among the 14 evaluated methods, even the strongest model (PLAY2PROMPT with Gemini-3-Pro) achieves only moderate performance and often struggles with API planning and execution. AISE-Bench establishes a challenging new testbed for quantitatively evaluating and improving the stepwise correctness, grounded summarization, and traceable reasoning of multi-step API-using LLM agents. Our code and data are available at https://aise-bench.github.io/.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 15

Institutional Books - Enriched Text: A customizable multilingual open-source pipeline for denoising, deduplicating, and annotating OCR text at scale

Released in 2025, Institutional Books: Harvard Library (IB-HL) is a collection of 983,004 volumes (242B o200k_base tokens), originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books Library project. As researchers and developers have begun to use IB-HL, a tension has emerged between standard large-scale preprocessing practices and the goals of careful information stewardship. Many existing pipelines optimize for web text: as a result, they tend to aggressively filter, deduplicate, restrict by language, and sometimes discard meaningful metadata. Meanwhile, researchers seeking to use IB-HL duplicate effort while performing similar processing and analysis. We describe an approach that we call Enriched Text. Instead of producing a single 'complete' stream of tokens, we normalize the text while preserving metadata through annotations. We separate endmatter, detect per-paragraph language, identify clusters of duplicate paragraphs, and compute per-paragraph bits-per-byte scores. We provide this information through HTML-like annotations layered on top of the text. By parsing these annotations, users can tailor the output to their own needs instead of accepting a global editorial decision on content. The pipeline applies to all approx250 languages in the collection. This report describes this project's goals, implementation, and design rationale. The release includes IB-HL-ET (an enriched-text version of IB-HL containing 217B o200k_base tokens across 983,003 volumes, organized into 1.39B annotated subtopic paragraphs) and the pipeline that produced it. These serve to make the collection easier for machines to parse and for humans to study.

HLE-Verified: A Systematic Verification and Structured Revision of Humanity's Last Exam

Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) has become a widely used benchmark for evaluating frontier large language models on challenging, multi-domain questions. However, community-led analyses have raised concerns that HLE contains a non-trivial number of noisy items, which can bias evaluation results and distort cross-model comparisons. To address this challenge, we introduce HLE-Verified, a verified and revised version of HLE with a transparent verification protocol and fine-grained error taxonomy. Our construction follows a two-stage validation-and-repair workflow resulting in a certified benchmark. In Stage I, each item undergoes binary validation of the problem and final answer through domain-expert review and model-based cross-checks, yielding 641 verified items. In Stage II, flawed but fixable items are revised under strict constraints preserving the original evaluation intent, through dual independent expert repairs, model-assisted auditing, and final adjudication, resulting in 1,170 revised-and-certified items. The remaining 689 items are released as a documented uncertain set with explicit uncertainty sources and expertise tags for future refinement. We evaluate seven state-of-the-art language models on HLE and HLE-Verified, observing an average absolute accuracy gain of 7--10 percentage points on HLE-Verified. The improvement is particularly pronounced on items where the original problem statement and/or reference answer is erroneous, with gains of 30--40 percentage points. Our analyses further reveal a strong association between model confidence and the presence of errors in the problem statement or reference answer, supporting the effectiveness of our revisions. Overall, HLE-Verified improves HLE-style evaluations by reducing annotation noise and enabling more faithful measurement of model capabilities. Data is available at: https://github.com/SKYLENAGE-AI/HLE-Verified

skylenage-ai Skylenage
·
Feb 14 3

The Science Data Lake: A Unified Open Infrastructure Integrating 293 Million Papers Across Eight Scholarly Sources with Embedding-Based Ontology Alignment

Scholarly data are largely fragmented across siloed databases with divergent metadata and missing linkages among them. We present the Science Data Lake, a locally-deployable infrastructure built on DuckDB and simple Parquet files that unifies eight open sources - Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, SciSciNet, Papers with Code, Retraction Watch, Reliance on Science, a preprint-to-published mapping, and Crossref - via DOI normalization while preserving source-level schemas. The resource comprises approximately 960GB of Parquet files spanning ~293 million uniquely identifiable papers across ~22 schemas and ~153 SQL views. An embedding-based ontology alignment using BGE-large sentence embeddings maps 4,516 OpenAlex topics to 13 scientific ontologies (~1.3 million terms), yielding 16,150 mappings covering 99.8% of topics (geq 0.65 threshold) with F1 = 0.77 at the recommended geq 0.85 operating point, outperforming TF-IDF, BM25, and Jaro-Winkler baselines on a 300-pair gold-standard evaluation. We validate through 10 automated checks, cross-source citation agreement analysis (pairwise Pearson r = 0.76 - 0.87), and stratified manual annotation. Four vignettes demonstrate cross-source analyses infeasible with any single database. The resource is open source, deployable on a single drive or queryable remotely via HuggingFace, and includes structured documentation suitable for large language model (LLM) based research agents.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 3

CryptoAnalystBench: Failures in Multi-Tool Long-Form LLM Analysis

Modern analyst agents must reason over complex, high token inputs, including dozens of retrieved documents, tool outputs, and time sensitive data. While prior work has produced tool calling benchmarks and examined factuality in knowledge augmented systems, relatively little work studies their intersection: settings where LLMs must integrate large volumes of dynamic, structured and unstructured multi tool outputs. We investigate LLM failure modes in this regime using crypto as a representative high data density domain. We introduce (1) CryptoAnalystBench, an analyst aligned benchmark of 198 production crypto and DeFi queries spanning 11 categories; (2) an agentic harness equipped with relevant crypto and DeFi tools to generate responses across multiple frontier LLMs; and (3) an evaluation pipeline with citation verification and an LLM as a judge rubric spanning four user defined success dimensions: relevance, temporal relevance, depth, and data consistency. Using human annotation, we develop a taxonomy of seven higher order error types that are not reliably captured by factuality checks or LLM based quality scoring. We find that these failures persist even in state of the art systems and can compromise high stakes decisions. Based on this taxonomy, we refine the judge rubric to better capture these errors. While the judge does not align with human annotators on precise scoring across rubric iterations, it reliably identifies critical failure modes, enabling scalable feedback for developers and researchers studying analyst style agents. We release CryptoAnalystBench with annotated queries, the evaluation pipeline, judge rubrics, and the error taxonomy, and outline mitigation strategies and open challenges in evaluating long form, multi tool augmented systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 10

Time Present and Time Past: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Temporally Evolving Document Understanding

Evolving documents, such as laws, tax codes, and software documentation, are amended, replaced, and sometimes reverted over time, so a question has different correct answers at different dates. In contrast to encyclopedic knowledge, where an old fact is simply overwritten, an amendment is itself an official text that states what it replaces and when it takes effect, and the earlier version stays correct for its validity period. The central challenge is therefore version resolution, that is, identifying the version in force on the queried date. Existing temporal QA datasets treat time only as an annotation, so version resolution stays untested. We present TIDE, an expert-verified benchmark of 3,050 QA pairs over 644 official customs instruments issued between 1969 and 2025 by the Government of Bangladesh, covering eight task types over deeply code-mixed documents that are heterogeneous in layout and dated in two calendars. In addition, we evaluate nine recent LLMs under a single protocol across parametric, gold-context, and retrieval access, scored by a three-judge LLM council with a hard date gate separating correct meaning from correct time. The best macro-averaged accuracy is only 68.5%. Resolving a version from an implicit date reaches 59.7%, and detecting that the supplied version does not govern the query reaches only 26.7%. Models are more likely to find correct versions than to reject incorrect ones, and they tend to follow a confident parametric answer over the supplied authoritative text. All code and data are available at https://github.com/icsetepa44/TIDE

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 8

IndicQE-APE: A Benchmark for Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-Editing for Indic Languages

Indic quality estimation (QE) and automatic post-editing (APE) data is spread across separate releases, so no single resource supports training and evaluation across tasks and language pairs on one footing. We consolidate the WMT 2020--2024 shared-task lineage with an extended English--Malayalam resource into \indicqe: 126{,}754 instances over nine directional pairs, with up to four label types aligned on the same segment, a direct assessment, a human post-edit, word-level OK/BAD tags and an error explanation, and a test set stratified over four difficulty axes. On it, we benchmark six prompted LLMs and three COMET metrics on segment-level QE, and three systems on APE. Two of the axes are defined partly on the direct assessment and select a compressed slice of it, so each axis is compared against a control drawn from the same language pair with the same score distribution. Only one survives that control: segments whose holistic and token-level quality signals conflict are ranked worse than equally-scored segments of the same language, for all nine systems and all seven pairs that carry the axis. Annotator disagreement, which looks second-hardest without the control, has no effect with it. Few-shot prompting costs every model leq 3.4B both correlation and output-format compliance. Within-language accuracy does not make scores comparable across pairs: of the three trained metrics, the one with the best within-language correlation loses most when the pairs are pooled. The benchmark and code will be released.

  • 18 authors
·
Aug 16

Large Language Models as Fiduciaries: A Case Study Toward Robustly Communicating With Artificial Intelligence Through Legal Standards

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking on increasingly autonomous roles, e.g., browsing the web as a research assistant and managing money. But specifying goals and restrictions for AI behavior is difficult. Similar to how parties to a legal contract cannot foresee every potential "if-then" contingency of their future relationship, we cannot specify desired AI behavior for all circumstances. Legal standards facilitate robust communication of inherently vague and underspecified goals. Instructions (in the case of language models, "prompts") that employ legal standards will allow AI agents to develop shared understandings of the spirit of a directive that generalize expectations regarding acceptable actions to take in unspecified states of the world. Standards have built-in context that is lacking from other goal specification languages, such as plain language and programming languages. Through an empirical study on thousands of evaluation labels we constructed from U.S. court opinions, we demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) are beginning to exhibit an "understanding" of one of the most relevant legal standards for AI agents: fiduciary obligations. Performance comparisons across models suggest that, as LLMs continue to exhibit improved core capabilities, their legal standards understanding will also continue to improve. OpenAI's latest LLM has 78% accuracy on our data, their previous release has 73% accuracy, and a model from their 2020 GPT-3 paper has 27% accuracy (worse than random). Our research is an initial step toward a framework for evaluating AI understanding of legal standards more broadly, and for conducting reinforcement learning with legal feedback (RLLF).

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 24, 2023

Deep Research, Shallow Evaluation: A Case Study in Meta-Evaluation for Long-Form QA Benchmarks

Recent advances have made long-form report-generating systems widely available. This has prompted evaluation frameworks that use LLM-as-judge protocols and claim verification, along with meta-evaluation frameworks that seek to validate these methods. Many of the meta-evaluations estimate an evaluation quality's by comparing its assessments against human pairwise preferences. Prior work, however, suggests that human pairwise preference may be overly simplistic and can fail to capture nuances of expert expectations. We conduct a case study in meta-evaluation for long-form QA benchmarks using ScholarQA-CS2, a benchmark designed for assessing retrieval-augmented deep-research QA in the scientific domain. We comprehensively validate the benchmark through human pairwise preference judgments, then critically examine the strengths, weaknesses, and confounders of this approach. We show that pairwise preference rankings are best suited for system-level evaluation, while explicit metric-wise annotations and expert annotators are critical for reliable metric-level assessment, with subjectivity remaining a key challenge. Based on our findings, we offer practical guidelines for designing future meta-evaluations that better align evaluation methods, annotator expertise, and reporting practices. By surfacing these methodological challenges, we aim to advance evaluation standards for deep-research systems.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 5

Video Annotator: A framework for efficiently building video classifiers using vision-language models and active learning

High-quality and consistent annotations are fundamental to the successful development of robust machine learning models. Traditional data annotation methods are resource-intensive and inefficient, often leading to a reliance on third-party annotators who are not the domain experts. Hard samples, which are usually the most informative for model training, tend to be difficult to label accurately and consistently without business context. These can arise unpredictably during the annotation process, requiring a variable number of iterations and rounds of feedback, leading to unforeseen expenses and time commitments to guarantee quality. We posit that more direct involvement of domain experts, using a human-in-the-loop system, can resolve many of these practical challenges. We propose a novel framework we call Video Annotator (VA) for annotating, managing, and iterating on video classification datasets. Our approach offers a new paradigm for an end-user-centered model development process, enhancing the efficiency, usability, and effectiveness of video classifiers. Uniquely, VA allows for a continuous annotation process, seamlessly integrating data collection and model training. We leverage the zero-shot capabilities of vision-language foundation models combined with active learning techniques, and demonstrate that VA enables the efficient creation of high-quality models. VA achieves a median 6.8 point improvement in Average Precision relative to the most competitive baseline across a wide-ranging assortment of tasks. We release a dataset with 153k labels across 56 video understanding tasks annotated by three professional video editors using VA, and also release code to replicate our experiments at: http://github.com/netflix/videoannotator.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 9, 2024

PEneo: Unifying Line Extraction, Line Grouping, and Entity Linking for End-to-end Document Pair Extraction

Document pair extraction aims to identify key and value entities as well as their relationships from visually-rich documents. Most existing methods divide it into two separate tasks: semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE). However, simply concatenating SER and RE serially can lead to severe error propagation, and it fails to handle cases like multi-line entities in real scenarios. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel framework, PEneo (Pair Extraction new decoder option), which performs document pair extraction in a unified pipeline, incorporating three concurrent sub-tasks: line extraction, line grouping, and entity linking. This approach alleviates the error accumulation problem and can handle the case of multi-line entities. Furthermore, to better evaluate the model's performance and to facilitate future research on pair extraction, we introduce RFUND, a re-annotated version of the commonly used FUNSD and XFUND datasets, to make them more accurate and cover realistic situations. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate PEneo's superiority over previous pipelines, boosting the performance by a large margin (e.g., 19.89%-22.91% F1 score on RFUND-EN) when combined with various backbones like LiLT and LayoutLMv3, showing its effectiveness and generality. Codes and the new annotations will be open to the public.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 7, 2024

Unlocking Science: Novel Dataset and Benchmark for Cross-Modality Scientific Information Extraction

Extracting key information from scientific papers has the potential to help researchers work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Over the last few years, research on Scientific Information Extraction (SciIE) witnessed the release of several new systems and benchmarks. However, existing paper-focused datasets mostly focus only on specific parts of a manuscript (e.g., abstracts) and are single-modality (i.e., text- or table-only), due to complex processing and expensive annotations. Moreover, core information can be present in either text or tables or across both. To close this gap in data availability and enable cross-modality IE, while alleviating labeling costs, we propose a semi-supervised pipeline for annotating entities in text, as well as entities and relations in tables, in an iterative procedure. Based on this pipeline, we release novel resources for the scientific community, including a high-quality benchmark, a large-scale corpus, and a semi-supervised annotation pipeline. We further report the performance of state-of-the-art IE models on the proposed benchmark dataset, as a baseline. Lastly, we explore the potential capability of large language models such as ChatGPT for the current task. Our new dataset, results, and analysis validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our semi-supervised pipeline, and we discuss its remaining limitations.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

Doomed to Re-Annotate, Forever: The ImageNet Story

Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k remains the most commonly reported metric in visual recognition. Quality issues with the dataset have been repeatedly reported, yet the original 2012 noisy labels are still predominantly used. The paper presents a comprehensive effort, which goes well beyond prior correction attempts, towards obtaining accurate and complete ImageNet-1k validation set annotations. The result, ReImageNet, includes multilabel correction, object localization, revised class definitions, and semantic attributes (text-recognition, rendition, reflection, crowd, dominant). The reannotation reveals that approximately 12% of the original ImageNet-1k labels are incorrect, 33.3% of images are multilabel and 3.8% contain no object from an ImageNet-1k class. With the new labels, top-1 accuracy increases by up to 1.2% for supervised models and by 5-6% for MLLMs. We argue that annotation at ImageNet scale cannot realistically be completed in one pass, as errors and definitional issues are discovered only through annotating, and we build our pipeline around repeated refinement and error checking. We observed that human and LLM collaboration with appropriate tooling represents the current quality ceiling for annotation at this scale. ImageNet-1k issues propagate into its derivative test sets, indicating that the problem is structural rather than specific to any single benchmark. All annotations, class definitions, guidelines, and analysis code have been publicly released. Project page: https://vrg.fel.cvut.cz/reimagenet Annotations: https://huggingface.co/datasets/vrg-prague/ReImageNet Code: https://github.com/klarajanouskova/ImageNet

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 12

Encapsulating Textual Contents into a MOC data Structure for Advanced Applications

Context. The Multi-Order Coverage map (MOC) is a widely adopted standard promoted by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) to support data sharing and interoperability within the Virtual Observatory (VO) ecosystem. This hierarchical data structure efficiently encodes and visualizes irregularly shaped regions of the sky, enabling applications such as cross-matching large astronomical catalogs. Aims. This study aims to explore potential enhancements to the MOC data structure by encapsulating textual descriptions and semantic embeddings into sky regions. Specifically, we introduce "Textual MOCs", in which textual content is encapsulated, and "Semantic MOCs" that transform textual content into semantic embeddings. These enhancements are designed to enable advanced operations such as similarity searches and complex queries and to integrate with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools. Method. We experimented with Textual MOCs by annotating detailed descriptions directly into the MOC sky regions, enriching the maps with contextual information suitable for interactive learning tools. For Semantic MOCs, we converted the textual content into semantic embeddings, numerical representations capturing textual meanings in multidimensional spaces, and stored them in high-dimensional vector databases optimized for efficient retrieval. Results. The implementation of Textual MOCs enhances user engagement by providing meaningful descriptions within sky regions. Semantic MOCs enable sophisticated query capabilities, such as similarity-based searches and context-aware data retrieval. Integration with multimodal generative AI systems allows for more accurate and contextually relevant interactions supporting both spatial, semantic and visual operations for advancing astronomical data analysis capabilities.

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 14, 2025

Taec: a Manually annotated text dataset for trait and phenotype extraction and entity linking in wheat breeding literature

Wheat varieties show a large diversity of traits and phenotypes. Linking them to genetic variability is essential for shorter and more efficient wheat breeding programs. Newly desirable wheat variety traits include disease resistance to reduce pesticide use, adaptation to climate change, resistance to heat and drought stresses, or low gluten content of grains. Wheat breeding experiments are documented by a large body of scientific literature and observational data obtained in-field and under controlled conditions. The cross-referencing of complementary information from the literature and observational data is essential to the study of the genotype-phenotype relationship and to the improvement of wheat selection. The scientific literature on genetic marker-assisted selection describes much information about the genotype-phenotype relationship. However, the variety of expressions used to refer to traits and phenotype values in scientific articles is a hinder to finding information and cross-referencing it. When trained adequately by annotated examples, recent text mining methods perform highly in named entity recognition and linking in the scientific domain. While several corpora contain annotations of human and animal phenotypes, currently, no corpus is available for training and evaluating named entity recognition and entity-linking methods in plant phenotype literature. The Triticum aestivum trait Corpus is a new gold standard for traits and phenotypes of wheat. It consists of 540 PubMed references fully annotated for trait, phenotype, and species named entities using the Wheat Trait and Phenotype Ontology and the species taxonomy of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A study of the performance of tools trained on the Triticum aestivum trait Corpus shows that the corpus is suitable for the training and evaluation of named entity recognition and linking.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 14, 2024

Historical Backtesting for Scientific Question Discovery: A Protocol and Astronomy Pilot

Systems that generate scientific research questions are evaluated today by expert scores, LLM-as-judge ratings, or curated case studies -- all subjective, none falsifiable. We formalize historical backtesting as an alternative: a system generates questions from a corpus frozen at a historical cutoff, the questions are frozen before any access to later literature, and a temporally isolated future corpus then determines whether each question was subsequently answered, partially addressed, independently posed, or ignored, and whether its underlying premise was supported or refuted. The protocol is model-agnostic: any system that emits frozen questions can be scored. We release reproducible astronomy instances with temporally isolated corpora, frozen questions, auditable labels, four reference baselines, and a submission interface. Two findings result. First, evidence-structure-first generation outperforms LLM-only prompting: across a generator decomposition crossed with a four-cutoff stress test (2010-2024, 798 judged questions) whose last window postdates model training, LLM-only generation shows memorized relevance without specific foresight, while a generator using no model weights at all finds questions whose premises the future refutes in every era. Second, a seven-rater agreement study (two blinded human annotators, five judge models, 90 items) indicts the outcome taxonomy rather than the judge: two careful humans agree at kappa = 0.17, every judge model agrees with the professional annotator as well or better (0.17-0.26), and frontier models agree with one another at 0.60 -- certifying an LLM judge by model-model agreement would have overstated its reliability threefold. A prospective instance -- 200 questions frozen 2026-08-17, scored 2027-2030 -- is released so the central claims become contamination-free tests that time itself will grade.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 16

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision -- are the stated claims supported? -- and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness -- absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks -- lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 150 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). A prompt ablation shows the low coverage is not an under-prompting artifact: explicitly asking models to be thorough does not close the gap. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 7 6

PIIBench: A Unified Multi-Source Benchmark Corpus for Personally Identifiable Information Detection

We present PIIBench, a unified benchmark corpus for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection in natural language text. Existing resources for PII detection are fragmented across domain-specific corpora with mutually incompatible annotation schemes, preventing systematic comparison of detection systems. We consolidate ten publicly available datasets spanning synthetic PII corpora, multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) benchmarks, and financial domain annotated text, yielding a corpus of 2,369,883 annotated sequences and 3.35 million entity mentions across 48 canonical PII entity types. We develop a principled normalization pipeline that maps 80+ source-specific label variants to a standardized BIO tagging scheme, applies frequency-based suppression of near absent entity types, and produces stratified 80/10/10 train/validation/test splits preserving source distribution. To establish baseline difficulty, we evaluate eight published systems spanning rule-based engines (Microsoft Presidio), general purpose NER models (spaCy, BERT-base NER, XLM-RoBERTa NER, SpanMarker mBERT, SpanMarker BERT), a PII-specific model (Piiranha DeBERTa), and a financial NER specialist (XtremeDistil FiNER). All systems achieve span-level F1 below 0.14, with the best system (Presidio, F1=0.1385) still producing zero recall on most entity types. These results directly quantify the domain-silo problem and demonstrate that PIIBench presents a substantially harder and more comprehensive evaluation challenge than any existing single source PII dataset. The dataset construction pipeline and benchmark evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/pritesh-2711/pii-bench.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 16

EDDA-Coordinata: An Annotated Dataset of Historical Geographic Coordinates

This paper introduces a dataset of enriched geographic coordinates retrieved from Diderot and d'Alembert's eighteenth-century Encyclopedie. Automatically recovering geographic coordinates from historical texts is a complex task, as they are expressed in a variety of ways and with varying levels of precision. To improve retrieval of coordinates from similar digitized early modern texts, we have created a gold standard dataset, trained models, published the resulting inferred and normalized coordinate data, and experimented applying these models to new texts. From 74,000 total articles in each of the digitized versions of the Encyclopedie from ARTFL and ENCCRE, we examined 15,278 geographical entries, manually identifying 4,798 containing coordinates, and 10,480 with descriptive but non-numerical references. Leveraging our gold standard annotations, we trained transformer-based models to retrieve and normalize coordinates. The pipeline presented here combines a classifier to identify coordinate-bearing entries and a second model for retrieval, tested across encoder-decoder and decoder architectures. Cross-validation yielded an 86% EM score. On an out-of-domain eighteenth-century Trevoux dictionary (also in French), our fine-tuned model had a 61% EM score, while for the nineteenth-century, 7th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in English, the EM was 77%. These findings highlight the gold standard dataset's usefulness as training data, and our two-step method's cross-lingual, cross-domain generalizability.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 27

Bundesrecht: An Open Library and Corpus for German Statutory Reference Processing

Statutory references are central to legal language understanding, but are difficult to process automatically, as they appear in compact and variable surface forms, may combine multiple targets, use special abbreviations, and often point to lower-level units. Existing tools for German focus either on parsing references from legal documents or accessing statutory text once citations are explicit. This paper introduces bundesrecht, an open resource for German statutory reference processing, consisting of a software library and a structured corpus of German federal law. The library parses, normalizes, and resolves German statutory references, mapping raw citation strings to structured objects, expanding compact references into canonical forms, and linking them to statutory provisions. The accompanying dataset preserves the internal hierarchy of statutes from laws to fine-granular subclauses. We evaluate the parser and normalizer on 2,944 annotated German legal references using strict exact-match and micro information extraction metrics. We further evaluate canonical reference deduplication and show that normalized references group real citation surface variants far more reliably than string matching. bundesrecht is the first open resource that covers German statutory reference processing as an end-to-end pipeline, from raw citation string to resolved statutory provision, and is available on PyPI.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28

Augmenting Chest X-ray Datasets with Non-Expert Annotations

The advancement of machine learning algorithms in medical image analysis requires the expansion of training datasets. A popular and cost-effective approach is automated annotation extraction from free-text medical reports, primarily due to the high costs associated with expert clinicians annotating medical images, such as chest X-rays. However, it has been shown that the resulting datasets are susceptible to biases and shortcuts. Another strategy to increase the size of a dataset is crowdsourcing, a widely adopted practice in general computer vision with some success in medical image analysis. In a similar vein to crowdsourcing, we enhance two publicly available chest X-ray datasets by incorporating non-expert annotations. However, instead of using diagnostic labels, we annotate shortcuts in the form of tubes. We collect 3.5k chest drain annotations for NIH-CXR14, and 1k annotations for four different tube types in PadChest, and create the Non-Expert Annotations of Tubes in X-rays (NEATX) dataset. We train a chest drain detector with the non-expert annotations that generalizes well to expert labels. Moreover, we compare our annotations to those provided by experts and show "moderate" to "almost perfect" agreement. Finally, we present a pathology agreement study to raise awareness about the quality of ground truth annotations. We make our dataset available on Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/records/14944064 and our code available at https://github.com/purrlab/chestxr-label-reliability.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 5, 2023

Who Watches the Watchmen? Humans Disagree With Translation Metrics on Unseen Domains

Automatic evaluation metrics are central to the development of machine translation systems, yet their robustness under domain shift remains unclear. Most metrics are developed on the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) benchmarks, raising concerns about their robustness to unseen domains. Prior studies that analyze unseen domains vary translation systems, annotators, or evaluation conditions, confounding domain effects with human annotation noise. To address these biases, we introduce a systematic multi-annotator Cross-Domain Error-Span-Annotation dataset (CD-ESA), comprising 18.8k human error span annotations across three language pairs, where we fix annotators within each language pair and evaluate translations of the same six translation systems across one seen news domain and two unseen technical domains. Using this dataset, we first find that automatic metrics appear surprisingly robust to domain-shifts at the segment level (up to 0.69 agreement), but this robustness largely disappears once we account for human label variation. Averaging annotations increases inter-annotator agreement by up to +0.11. Metrics struggle on the unseen chemical domain compared to humans (inter-annotator agreement of 0.78-0.83 vs. 0.96). We recommend comparing metric-human agreement against inter-annotator agreement, rather than comparing raw metric-human agreement alone, when evaluating across different domains.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 19

Towards Semantic Versioning of Open Pre-trained Language Model Releases on Hugging Face

The proliferation of open Pre-trained Language Models (PTLMs) on model registry platforms like Hugging Face (HF) presents both opportunities and challenges for companies building products around them. Similar to traditional software dependencies, PTLMs continue to evolve after a release. However, the current state of release practices of PTLMs on model registry platforms are plagued by a variety of inconsistencies, such as ambiguous naming conventions and inaccessible model training documentation. Given the knowledge gap on current PTLM release practices, our empirical study uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the releases of 52,227 PTLMs on the most well-known model registry, HF. Our results reveal 148 different naming practices for PTLM releases, with 40.87% of changes to model weight files not represented in the adopted name-based versioning practice or their documentation. In addition, we identified that the 52,227 PTLMs are derived from only 299 different base models (the modified original models used to create 52,227 PTLMs), with Fine-tuning and Quantization being the most prevalent modification methods applied to these base models. Significant gaps in release transparency, in terms of training dataset specifications and model card availability, still exist, highlighting the need for standardized documentation. While we identified a model naming practice explicitly differentiating between major and minor PTLM releases, we did not find any significant difference in the types of changes that went into either type of releases, suggesting that major/minor version numbers for PTLMs often are chosen arbitrarily. Our findings provide valuable insights to improve PTLM release practices, nudging the field towards more formal semantic versioning practices.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024

PrionNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset for Prion Disease Biomedical Literature

Prion diseases are rare, rapidly progressive, and fatal neurodegenerative disorders that remain difficult to diagnose, particularly in their early stages because of nonspecific clinical presentations. However, to our knowledge, there is no publicly available prion-disease-focused dataset designed to capture a broad range of clinically relevant entities from the biomedical literature. We introduce PrionNER, a manually annotated named entity recognition dataset for prion disease clinical information in PubMed abstracts. The current release comprises 317 abstracts, 2,943 sentences, and 6,955 text-bound entity annotations spanning 15 coarse-grained and 31 fine-grained clinically oriented entity types covering diseases, symptoms, diagnostics, findings, anatomy, treatments, and temporal and statistical evidence. Inter-annotator agreement reaches 81.78 exact-match F1, indicating strong annotation consistency. We benchmark supervised BERT baselines, W2NER, and zero-shot extractors on PrionNER. W2NER is the strongest supervised model, and Gemma-4-31B is the strongest zero-shot model, but the benchmark remains challenging, especially for structurally complex mentions and fine-grained clinically adjacent label distinctions. PrionNER provides a clinically grounded benchmark for prion-disease information extraction and supports research on rare-disease biomedical NLP under low-resource, fine-grained, and non-flat extraction conditions. The dataset, annotation guidelines, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/daotuanan/PrionNER/.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26

CODE-ACCORD: A Corpus of Building Regulatory Data for Rule Generation towards Automatic Compliance Checking

Automatic Compliance Checking (ACC) within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector necessitates automating the interpretation of building regulations to achieve its full potential. However, extracting information from textual rules to convert them to a machine-readable format has been a challenge due to the complexities associated with natural language and the limited resources that can support advanced machine-learning techniques. To address this challenge, we introduce CODE-ACCORD, a unique dataset compiled under the EU Horizon ACCORD project. CODE-ACCORD comprises 862 self-contained sentences extracted from the building regulations of England and Finland. Aligned with our core objective of facilitating information extraction from text for machine-readable rule generation, each sentence was annotated with entities and relations. Entities represent specific components such as "window" and "smoke detectors", while relations denote semantic associations between these entities, collectively capturing the conveyed ideas in natural language. We manually annotated all the sentences using a group of 12 annotators. Each sentence underwent annotations by multiple annotators and subsequently careful data curation to finalise annotations, ensuring their accuracy and reliability, thereby establishing the dataset as a solid ground truth. CODE-ACCORD offers a rich resource for diverse machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) related tasks in ACC, including text classification, entity recognition and relation extraction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first entity and relation-annotated dataset in compliance checking, which is also publicly available.

  • 14 authors
·
Mar 4, 2024

SSKG Hub: An Expert-Guided Platform for LLM-Empowered Sustainability Standards Knowledge Graphs

Sustainability disclosure standards (e.g., GRI, SASB, TCFD, IFRS S2) are comprehensive yet lengthy, terminology-dense, and highly cross-referential, hindering structured analysis and downstream use. We present SSKG Hub (Sustainability Standards Knowledge Graph Hub), a research prototype and interactive web platform that transforms standards into auditable knowledge graphs (KGs) through an LLM-centered, expert-guided pipeline. The system integrates automatic standard identification, configurable chunking, standard-specific prompting, robust triple parsing, and provenance-aware Neo4j storage with fine-grained audit metadata. LLM extraction produces a provenance-linked Draft KG, which is reviewed, curated, and formally promoted to a Certified KG through meta-expert adjudication. A role-based governance framework covering read-only guest access, expert review and CRUD operations, meta-expert certification, and administrative oversight ensures traceability and accountability across draft and certified states. Beyond graph exploration and triple-level evidence tracing, SSKG Hub supports cross-KG fusion, KG-driven tasks, and dedicated modules for insights and curated resources. We validate the platform through a comprehensive expert-led KG review case study that demonstrates end-to-end curation and quality assurance. The web application is publicly available at www.sskg-hub.com.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 27

Pre-trained Language Models as Re-Annotators

Annotation noise is widespread in datasets, but manually revising a flawed corpus is time-consuming and error-prone. Hence, given the prior knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models and the expected uniformity across all annotations, we attempt to reduce annotation noise in the corpus through two tasks automatically: (1) Annotation Inconsistency Detection that indicates the credibility of annotations, and (2) Annotation Error Correction that rectifies the abnormal annotations. We investigate how to acquire semantic sensitive annotation representations from Pre-trained Language Models, expecting to embed the examples with identical annotations to the mutually adjacent positions even without fine-tuning. We proposed a novel credibility score to reveal the likelihood of annotation inconsistencies based on the neighbouring consistency. Then, we fine-tune the Pre-trained Language Models based classifier with cross-validation for annotation correction. The annotation corrector is further elaborated with two approaches: (1) soft labelling by Kernel Density Estimation and (2) a novel distant-peer contrastive loss. We study the re-annotation in relation extraction and create a new manually revised dataset, Re-DocRED, for evaluating document-level re-annotation. The proposed credibility scores show promising agreement with human revisions, achieving a Binary F1 of 93.4 and 72.5 in detecting inconsistencies on TACRED and DocRED respectively. Moreover, the neighbour-aware classifiers based on distant-peer contrastive learning and uncertain labels achieve Macro F1 up to 66.2 and 57.8 in correcting annotations on TACRED and DocRED respectively. These improvements are not merely theoretical: Rather, automatically denoised training sets demonstrate up to 3.6% performance improvement for state-of-the-art relation extraction models.

  • 1 authors
·
May 11, 2022

Deep literature reviews: an application of fine-tuned language models to migration research

This paper presents a hybrid framework for literature reviews that augments traditional bibliometric methods with large language models (LLMs). By fine-tuning open-source LLMs, our approach enables scalable extraction of qualitative insights from large volumes of research content, enhancing both the breadth and depth of knowledge synthesis. To improve annotation efficiency and consistency, we introduce an error-focused validation process in which LLMs generate initial labels and human reviewers correct misclassifications. Applying this framework to over 20000 scientific articles about human migration, we demonstrate that a domain-adapted LLM can serve as a "specialist" model - capable of accurately selecting relevant studies, detecting emerging trends, and identifying critical research gaps. Notably, the LLM-assisted review reveals a growing scholarly interest in climate-induced migration. However, existing literature disproportionately centers on a narrow set of environmental hazards (e.g., floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and land degradation), while overlooking others that more directly affect human health and well-being, such as air and water pollution or infectious diseases. This imbalance highlights the need for more comprehensive research that goes beyond physical environmental changes to examine their ecological and societal consequences, particularly in shaping migration as an adaptive response. Overall, our proposed framework demonstrates the potential of fine-tuned LLMs to conduct more efficient, consistent, and insightful literature reviews across disciplines, ultimately accelerating knowledge synthesis and scientific discovery.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 17, 2025

Magic Words or Methodical Work? Challenging Conventional Wisdom in LLM-Based Political Text Annotation

Political scientists are rapidly adopting large language models (LLMs) for text annotation, yet the sensitivity of annotation results to implementation choices remains poorly understood. Most evaluations test a single model or configuration; how model choice, model size, learning approach, and prompt style interact, and whether popular "best practices" survive controlled comparison, are largely unexplored. We present a controlled evaluation of these pipeline choices, testing six open-weight models across four political science annotation tasks under identical quantisation, hardware, and prompt-template conditions. Our central finding is methodological: interaction effects dominate main effects, so seemingly reasonable pipeline choices can become consequential researcher degrees of freedom. No single model, prompt style, or learning approach is uniformly superior, and the best-performing model varies across tasks. Two corollaries follow. First, model size is an unreliable guide both to cost and to performance: cross-family efficiency differences are so large that some larger models are less resource-intensive than much smaller alternatives, while within model families mid-range variants often match or exceed larger counterparts. Second, widely recommended prompt engineering techniques yield inconsistent and sometimes negative effects on annotation performance. We use these benchmark results to develop a validation-first framework - with a principled ordering of pipeline decisions, guidance on prompt freezing and held-out evaluation, reporting standards, and open-source tools - to help researchers navigate this decision space transparently.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27

Why Settle for One? Text-to-ImageSet Generation and Evaluation

Despite remarkable progress in Text-to-Image models, many real-world applications require generating coherent image sets with diverse consistency requirements. Existing consistent methods often focus on a specific domain with specific aspects of consistency, which significantly constrains their generalizability to broader applications. In this paper, we propose a more challenging problem, Text-to-ImageSet (T2IS) generation, which aims to generate sets of images that meet various consistency requirements based on user instructions. To systematically study this problem, we first introduce T2IS-Bench with 596 diverse instructions across 26 subcategories, providing comprehensive coverage for T2IS generation. Building on this, we propose T2IS-Eval, an evaluation framework that transforms user instructions into multifaceted assessment criteria and employs effective evaluators to adaptively assess consistency fulfillment between criteria and generated sets. Subsequently, we propose AutoT2IS, a training-free framework that maximally leverages pretrained Diffusion Transformers' in-context capabilities to harmonize visual elements to satisfy both image-level prompt alignment and set-level visual consistency. Extensive experiments on T2IS-Bench reveal that diverse consistency challenges all existing methods, while our AutoT2IS significantly outperforms current generalized and even specialized approaches. Our method also demonstrates the ability to enable numerous underexplored real-world applications, confirming its substantial practical value. Visit our project in https://chengyou-jia.github.io/T2IS-Home.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 29, 2025

Understanding Dominant Themes in Reviewing Agentic AI-authored Code

While prior work has examined the generation capabilities of Agentic AI systems, little is known about how reviewers respond to AI-authored code in practice. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study of code review dynamics in agent-generated PRs. Using a curated subset of the AIDev dataset, we analyze 19,450 inline review comments spanning 3,177 agent-authored PRs from real-world GitHub repositories. We first derive a taxonomy of 12 review comment themes using topic modeling combined with large language model (LLM)-assisted semantic clustering and consolidation. According to this taxonomy, we then investigate whether zero-shot prompts to LLM can reliably annotate review comments. Our evaluation against human annotations shows that open-source LLM achieves reasonably high exact match (78.63%), macro F1 score (0.78), and substantial agreement with human annotators at the review comment level. At the PR level, the LLM also correctly identifies the dominant review theme with 78% Top-1 accuracy and achieves an average Jaccard similarity of 0.76, indicating strong alignment with human judgments. Applying this annotation pipeline at scale, we find that apart from functional correctness and logical changes, reviews of agent-authored PRs predominantly focus on documentation gaps, refactoring needs, styling and formatting issues, with testing and security-related concerns. These findings suggest that while AI agents can accelerate code production, there remain gaps requiring targeted human review oversight.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 27

CsFEVER and CTKFacts: Acquiring Czech data for fact verification

In this paper, we examine several methods of acquiring Czech data for automated fact-checking, which is a task commonly modeled as a classification of textual claim veracity w.r.t. a corpus of trusted ground truths. We attempt to collect sets of data in form of a factual claim, evidence within the ground truth corpus, and its veracity label (supported, refuted or not enough info). As a first attempt, we generate a Czech version of the large-scale FEVER dataset built on top of Wikipedia corpus. We take a hybrid approach of machine translation and document alignment; the approach and the tools we provide can be easily applied to other languages. We discuss its weaknesses and inaccuracies, propose a future approach for their cleaning and publish the 127k resulting translations, as well as a version of such dataset reliably applicable for the Natural Language Inference task - the CsFEVER-NLI. Furthermore, we collect a novel dataset of 3,097 claims, which is annotated using the corpus of 2.2M articles of Czech News Agency. We present its extended annotation methodology based on the FEVER approach, and, as the underlying corpus is kept a trade secret, we also publish a standalone version of the dataset for the task of Natural Language Inference we call CTKFactsNLI. We analyze both acquired datasets for spurious cues - annotation patterns leading to model overfitting. CTKFacts is further examined for inter-annotator agreement, thoroughly cleaned, and a typology of common annotator errors is extracted. Finally, we provide baseline models for all stages of the fact-checking pipeline and publish the NLI datasets, as well as our annotation platform and other experimental data.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 26, 2022

tasksource: Structured Dataset Preprocessing Annotations for Frictionless Extreme Multi-Task Learning and Evaluation

The HuggingFace Datasets Hub hosts thousands of datasets. This provides exciting opportunities for language model training and evaluation. However, the datasets for a given type of task are stored with different schemas, and harmonization is harder than it seems (https://xkcd.com/927/). Multi-task training or evaluation requires manual work to fit data into task templates. Various initiatives independently address this problem by releasing the harmonized datasets or harmonization codes to preprocess datasets to the same format. We identify patterns across previous preprocessings, e.g. mapping of column names, and extraction of a specific sub-field from structured data in a column, and propose a structured annotation framework that makes our annotations fully exposed and not buried in unstructured code. We release a dataset annotation framework and dataset annotations for more than 400 English tasks (https://github.com/sileod/tasksource). These annotations provide metadata, like the name of the columns that should be used as input or labels for all datasets, and can save time for future dataset preprocessings, even if they do not use our framework. We fine-tune a multi-task text encoder on all tasksource tasks, outperforming every publicly available text encoder of comparable size on an external evaluation https://hf.co/sileod/deberta-v3-base-tasksource-nli.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 14, 2023

GUI-Primitives: Diagnosing Spatial Reasoning Failures in Vision-Language GUI Grounding

Computer-use agents ground natural-language instructions in screenshots to locate interface elements, yet existing benchmarks do not isolate whether models bind relational language to the correct element. We introduce GUI-Primitives, a 994-item benchmark of contrastive instruction pairs over seven spatial relations in graphical user interfaces (left/right, above/below, containment, alignment, proximity, list ordinal, occlusion). Each pair holds the screenshot and anchor fixed while changing the relation expression, so the correct target moves between two designated candidates. Five annotators validate a 196-item subset (κ= 0.94 well-formedness; κ= 0.79 target selection). Nineteen vision-language models reach at most 32% strict point-in-box accuracy. Because models emit unconstrained coordinates, we classify each prediction by the candidate region it falls within. Predictions fall outside both candidates on 60-92% of items. Conditional on falling within a candidate region, target selection reaches 0.82-0.90 for horizontal position, vertical position, proximity, and list ordinal, but does not differ significantly from 0.50 for containment and occlusion: most failures reflect candidate localization rather than relation understanding. Across ten models, benchmark accuracy correlates with ScreenSpot-Pro accuracy (Spearman ρ= +0.74), an exploratory association at this sample size. Marking the two designated candidates raises selection accuracy by 35--57 percentage points, an oracle diagnostic that supplies the candidate set rather than a deployable method. We release the benchmark, predictions, and code.