Jargonautica
Measuring Performance

Inter-rater Reliability

Whether your human graders agree with each other. If two competent people looking at the same output give different scores, the measurement is unstable and no amount of averaging fixes the underlying ambiguity. Low agreement usually means the rubric is unclear rather than that the raters are careless.

Technical view

Measured by Cohen’s kappa for two raters, Fleiss’ kappa for more, or Krippendorff’s alpha for mixed data types, all correcting for chance agreement. Values below about 0.6 indicate the task definition needs work. It sets a ceiling on achievable model performance as measured, since a model cannot exceed the reliability of the labels. It should also be reported when validating a model judge against human raters.


Part of AI Terminology Index, section: Measuring Performance.

How it connects

Inter-rater Reliability links to 6 other terms. The faint lines are links between those terms. See it in the full graph.

Data Labelling and AnnotationData Labelling and …Human Evaluation ProtocolHuman Evaluation Pr…LLM as a JudgeLLM as a JudgeLabel NoiseLabel NoiseGround TruthGround TruthRubricRubricInter-rater Reliability