Annotation Quality in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study Comparing Experts, Students, Crowdworkers, and Large Language Models

Niklas Donhauser, Jakob Fehle, Nils Constantin Hellwig, Markus Weinberger, Udo Kruschwitz, Christian Wolff


Abstract
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) enables fine-grained opinion analysis by identifying sentiments toward specific aspects or targets within a text. While ABSA has been widely studied for English, research on other languages such as German remains limited, largely due to the lack of high-quality annotated datasets. This paper examines how different annotation sources influence the development of German ABSA. To this end, an existing dataset is re-annotated by experts to establish a ground truth, which serves as a reference for evaluating annotations produced by students, crowdworkers, Large Language Models (LLMs), and experts. Annotation quality is compared using Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA) and its impact on downstream model performance for different ABSA subtasks. The evaluation focuses on Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA) and Target Aspect Sentiment Detection (TASD). We apply State-of-the-Art (SOTA) methods for ABSA, including BERT-, T5-, and LLaMA-based approaches to assess performance differences, spanning fine-tuning and in-context learning with instruction prompts. The findings provide practical insights into trade-offs between annotation reliability, and efficiency, offering guidance for dataset construction in under-resourced Natural Language Processing (NLP) scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2026.resourceful-4.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Felix Morger, Nikolai Ilinykh, Barbara Scalvini, Simon Dobnik, Dana Dannélls
Venues:
RESOURCEFUL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
73–88
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-resourceful-08
DOI:
10.63317/39nwcnfj8ypb
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Niklas Donhauser, Jakob Fehle, Nils Constantin Hellwig, Markus Weinberger, Udo Kruschwitz, and Christian Wolff. 2026. Annotation Quality in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study Comparing Experts, Students, Crowdworkers, and Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026), pages 73–88, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Annotation Quality in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study Comparing Experts, Students, Crowdworkers, and Large Language Models (Donhauser et al., RESOURCEFUL 2026)
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