Evaluating the impact of pre-annotation on annotation speed and potential bias: natural language processing gold standard development for clinical named entity recognition in clinical trial announcements

Abstract

On every experiment pair, the annotator with the pre-annotated text needed less time to annotate than the annotator with non-labeled text. The time savings were statistically significant. Moreover, the pre-annotation did not reduce the IAA or annotator performance. Dictionary-based pre-annotation is a feasible and practical method to reduce the cost of annotation of clinical named entity recognition in the eligibility sections of clinical trial announcements without introducing bias in the annotation process.