Generalizable Error Modeling for Human Data Annotation: Evidence from an Industry-Scale Search Data Annotation Program

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems rely heavily on human-annotated data for training and evaluation. A major challenge in this context is the occurrence of annotation errors, as their effects can degrade model performance. This paper presents a predictive error model trained to detect potential errors in search relevance annotation tasks for three industry-scale ML applications (music streaming, video streaming, and mobile apps). Drawing on real-world data from an extensive search relevance annotation program, we demonstrate that errors can be predicted with…