Adjudicator Agreement and System Rankings for Person Name Search

We have analyzed system rankings for person name search algorithms using a data set for which several versions of ground truth were developed by employing different means of resolving adjudicator conflicts. Thirteen algorithms were ranked by F-score, using bootstrap resampling for significance testing, on a dataset containing 70,000 romanized names from various cultures. We found some disagreement among the four adjudicators, with kappa ranging from 0.57 to 0.78. Truth sets based on a single adjudicator, and on the intersection or union of positive adjudications produced sizeable variability in scoring sensitivity – and to a lesser degree rank order – compared to the consensus truth set. However, results on truth sets constructed by randomly choosing an adjudicator for each item were highly consistent with the consensus. The implication is that an evaluation where one adjudicator has judged each item is nearly as good as a more expensive and labor-intensive one where multiple adjudicators have judged each item and conflicts are resolved through voting.