Annotating Legitimate Disagreement in Corpus Construction

This paper addresses the resolution of inter-annotator disagreement in corpus construction. Given the consistency requirement which is regarded as a critical criterion of annotation quality, interannotator disagreement is usually considered harmful to the accuracy and reliability of annotation, and thus has to be resolved through various means. We claim that strictly adhering to consistency would also neglect the legitimate disagreement originating from ambiguity in natural languages. We highlight the values of preserving legitimate disagreement in annotation, and show that the possible problems resulting from inconsistency are avoidable. A preliminary annotation scheme is suggested for supporting multiple versions of annotation, without giving up the virtue