Automatic Coding of Open-ended Questions into Multiple Classes: Whether and How to Use Double Coded Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Responses to open-ended questions in surveys are usually coded into pre-specified classes, manually or automatically using a statistical learning algorithm. Automatic coding of open-ended responses relies on a set of manually coded responses, based on which a statistical learning model is fitted. In this paper, we investigate whether and how double coding can help improve the automatic classification of open-ended responses. We evaluate four strategies for training the statistical algorithm on double coded data, using experiments on simulated and real data. We find that, when the data are already double-coded (i.e. double coding does not incur additional costs), double coding where an expert resolves intercoder disagreement leads to the greatest classification accuracy. However, when we have a fixed budget for manually coding, single coding is preferable if the coding error rate is anticipated to be less than about 35% to 45%.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".