Crowdsourcing Subjective Annotations Using Pairwise Comparisons Reduces Bias and Error Compared to the Majority-vote Method

How to better reduce measurement variability and bias introduced by subjectivity in crowdsourced labelling remains an open question. We introduce a theoretical framework for understanding how random error and measurement bias enter into crowdsourced annotations of subjective constructs. We then propose a pipeline that combines pairwise comparison labelling with Elo scoring, and demonstrate that it outperforms the ubiquitous majority-voting method in reducing both types of measurement error. To assess the performance of the labelling approaches, we constructed an agent-based model of crowdsourced labelling that lets us introduce different types of subjectivity into the tasks. We find that under most conditions with task subjectivity, the comparison approach produced higher 𝑓 1 scores. Further, the comparison approach is less susceptible to inflating bias, which majority voting tends to do. To facilitate applications, we show with simulated and real-world data that the number of required random comparisons for the same classification accuracy scales loglinearly 𝑂 (𝑁 log 𝑁 ) with the number of labelled items. We also implemented the Elo system as an open-source Python package.