# Challenges in annotations by humans and LLMs: A case study of evaluative language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28119/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

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- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [Toward a Perspectivist Turn in Ground Truthing for Predictive Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04270/) (2021)
- [Automated Annotation with Generative AI Requires Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00176/) (2023)
- [When do you need Chain-of-Thought Prompting for ChatGPT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03262/) (2023)
- [Prompting and Fine-Tuning Open-Sourced Large Language Models for Stance Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13734/) (2023)
- [Assessing the potential of LLM-assisted annotation for corpus-based pragmatics and discourse analysis: The case of apology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08339/) (2023)
- [Towards a Perspectivist Turn in Argument Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14501/) (2025)
- [GPT Assisted Annotation of Rhetorical and Linguistic Features for Interpretable Propaganda Technique Detection in News Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11827/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we draw a comparison between linguists in training, a trained linguist, and annotations generated by large language models (LLMs) to find out if they struggle with complex linguistic phenomena in a similar way. For this purpose, we analyse evaluative language in spoken popular science discourse, with the example of a corpus of English TED talk transcripts. We focus on the Appraisal theory and its Attitude subsystem, including the categories (classes) of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. In this context, Appraisal theory is an example of a highly subjective annotation task, making it a suitable example for the study of complex annotation challenges. First, we assess human annotations on a sentence level in specific scientific domains. Then, we develop three prompts and compare them for model performance for the automatic classification of Appraisal classes. We assess the performance of three LLMs using the best-performing prompt and finetune the model, reaching an F1-score of 0.77. We find that models perform best compared to annotations conducted by the trained linguist, while linguists in training do not reach high agreement scores. We conclude that LLMs can aid in complex annotation task resolution, opening new pathways for the complex theories annotated and analyzed in digital humanities studies.