Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets for Large Language Model Data Annotation: A Novel Approach to Side-by-Side Preference Labeling

The quality of human preference data is crucial for training and evaluating large language models (LLMs), particularly in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) scenarios. Traditional side-by-side (SBS) annotation approaches often struggle with inherent uncertainty, annotator disagreement, and the complexity of preference judgments. This paper introduces a novel framework based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) for modeling and aggregating human preferences in LLM data annotation tasks. Our approach captures not only the degree of preference but also the uncertainty and hesitation inherent in human judgment through membership, non-membership, and hesitation degrees. We propose an IFS-based annotation protocol that enables more nuanced preference modeling, develops aggregation methods for handling annotator disagreement, and introduces quality metrics for preference data assessment. Experimental validation on multiple datasets demonstrates that our IFS-based approach significantly improves annotation consistency, reduces annotator fatigue, and produces higher-quality preference data compared to traditional binary and Likert-scale methods. The resulting preference datasets lead to improved model performance in downstream tasks, with 12.3% improvement in win-rate against baseline models and 15.7% reduction in annotation time. Our framework provides a principled approach to handling uncertainty in human preference annotation and offers practical benefits for large-scale LLM training.