Decomposing and Predicting Annotation Disagreement in Harmful Content Across Languages

Abstract

Annotator disagreement is increasingly recognized as a meaningful property of subjective tasks, rather than merely noise to be removed. Predicting which items are likely to be contested could help allocate annotation effort and route difficult cases to human review. We propose predicting disagreement from interpretable semantic properties of the text. An LLM answers a set of binary questions covering harmful-content characteristics, disagreement-related cues such as borderline severity and missing context, and language-sensitive cues such as local slurs. A classifier predicts disagreement from these answers, and we analyze which questions contribute most to the predictions. Across four datasets in English, German, and Turkish and three open-weight LLMs, our structured question features outperform direct prompting by 10.5 ROC-AUC points and the strongest text-based baselines by 5.0 points. A compact subset of eight questions performs within 1.5 ROC-AUC points of the full twenty-question set. In leave-one-dataset-out evaluation, models retain roughly 90-95% of their in-domain ROC-AUC. Across models and datasets, questions about derogation, missing context, and decision boundaries serve as the strongest predictors, suggesting that what makes harmful content contested is partly observable in the text.