Inferring object rankings based on noisy pairwise comparisons from multiple annotators

Ranking a set of objects involves establishing an order allowing for comparisons between any pair of objects in the set. Oftentimes, due to the unavailability of a ground truth of ranked orders, researchers resort to obtaining judgments from multiple annotators followed by inferring the ground truth based on the collective knowledge of the crowd. However, the aggregation is often ad-hoc and involves imposing stringent assumptions in inferring the ground truth (e.g. majority vote). In this work, we propose Expectation-Maximization (EM) based algorithms that rely on the judgments from multiple annotators and the object attributes for inferring the latent ground truth. The algorithm learns the relation between the latent ground truth and object attributes as well as annotator specific “probabilities of flipping”, a metric to assess annotator quality. We further extend the EM algorithm to allow for a variable “probability of flipping” based on the pair of objects at hand. We test our algorithms on two data sets with synthetic annotations and investigate the impact of annotator quality and quantity on the inferred ground truth. We also obtain the results on two other data sets with annotations from machine/human annotators and interpret the output trends based on the data characteristics.