CODA-19: Reliably Annotating Research Aspects on 10,000+ CORD-19 Abstracts Using a Non-Expert Crowd

This paper introduces CODA-19, a human-annotated dataset that codes the Background, Purpose, Method, Finding/Contribution, and Other sections of 10,966 English abstracts in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset. CODA-19 was created by 248 crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk within 10 days, achieving a label quality comparable to that of experts. Each abstract was annotated by nine different workers, and the final labels were obtained by majority vote. The inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's kappa) between the crowd and the biomedical expert (0.741) is comparable to inter-expert agreement (0.788). CODA-19's labels have an accuracy of 82.2% when compared to the biomedical expert's labels, while the accuracy between experts was 85.0%. Reliable human annotations help scientists to understand the rapidly accelerating coronavirus literature and also serve as the battery of AI/NLP research, but obtaining expert annotations can be slow. We demonstrated that a non-expert crowd can be rapidly employed at scale to join the fight against COVID-19.