title: Agreement, the f-measure, and reliability in information retrieval.
abstract: Information retrieval studies that involve searching the Internet or marking phrases usually lack a well-defined number of negative cases. This prevents the use of traditional interrater reliability metrics like the kappa statistic to assess the quality of expert-generated gold standards. Such studies often quantify system performance as precision, recall, and F-measure, or as agreement. It can be shown that the average F-measure among pairs of experts is numerically identical to the average positive specific agreement among experts and that kappa approaches these measures as the number of negative cases grows large. Positive specific agreement-or the equivalent F-measure-may be an appropriate way to quantify interrater reliability and therefore to assess the reliability of a gold standard in these studies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Columbia University, 622 West 168th Street, VC5, New York, NY 10032, USA. hripcsak@columbia.edu
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hripcsak
authors.forename: Adam S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Rothschild
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D020407:Internet; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015588:Observer Variation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results