The Alternative Annotator Test for LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Statistically Justify Replacing Human Annotators with LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Calderon, Nitay, Reichart, Roi, Dror, Rotem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Calderon, Nitay
Reichart, Roi
Dror, Rotem
author_facet Calderon, Nitay
Reichart, Roi
Dror, Rotem
contents The "LLM-as-an-annotator" and "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigms employ Large Language Models (LLMs) as annotators, judges, and evaluators in tasks traditionally performed by humans. LLM annotations are widely used, not only in NLP research but also in fields like medicine, psychology, and social science. Despite their role in shaping study results and insights, there is no standard or rigorous procedure to determine whether LLMs can replace human annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical procedure, the Alternative Annotator Test (alt-test), that requires only a modest subset of annotated examples to justify using LLM annotations. Additionally, we introduce a versatile and interpretable measure for comparing LLM annotators and judges. To demonstrate our procedure, we curated a diverse collection of ten datasets, consisting of language and vision-language tasks, and conducted experiments with six LLMs and four prompting techniques. Our results show that LLMs can sometimes replace humans with closed-source LLMs (such as GPT-4o), outperforming the open-source LLMs we examine, and that prompting techniques yield judges of varying quality. We hope this study encourages more rigorous and reliable practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10970
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Alternative Annotator Test for LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Statistically Justify Replacing Human Annotators with LLMs
Calderon, Nitay
Reichart, Roi
Dror, Rotem
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
The "LLM-as-an-annotator" and "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigms employ Large Language Models (LLMs) as annotators, judges, and evaluators in tasks traditionally performed by humans. LLM annotations are widely used, not only in NLP research but also in fields like medicine, psychology, and social science. Despite their role in shaping study results and insights, there is no standard or rigorous procedure to determine whether LLMs can replace human annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical procedure, the Alternative Annotator Test (alt-test), that requires only a modest subset of annotated examples to justify using LLM annotations. Additionally, we introduce a versatile and interpretable measure for comparing LLM annotators and judges. To demonstrate our procedure, we curated a diverse collection of ten datasets, consisting of language and vision-language tasks, and conducted experiments with six LLMs and four prompting techniques. Our results show that LLMs can sometimes replace humans with closed-source LLMs (such as GPT-4o), outperforming the open-source LLMs we examine, and that prompting techniques yield judges of varying quality. We hope this study encourages more rigorous and reliable practices.
title The Alternative Annotator Test for LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Statistically Justify Replacing Human Annotators with LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10970