Cheap Annotation of Complex Information: A Study on the Annotation of Information Status in German TEDx Talks

We present an annotation experiment for the annotation of information status in German TEDx Talks with the main goal to reduce annotation costs in terms of time and personnel.We aim for maximizing efficiency while keeping annotation quality constant by testing various different annotation scenarios for an optimal ratio of annotation expenses to resulting quality of the annotations.We choose the RefLex scheme of Riester and Baumann (2017) as a basis for our annotations, refine their annotation guidelines for a more generalizable tagset and conduct the experiment on German Tedx talks, applying different constellations of annotators, curators and correctors to test for an optimal annotation scenario.Our results show that we can achieve equally good and possibly even better results with significantly less effort, by using correctors instead of additional annotators.