Human vs LLM in Conversational Repair Annotation: A New Resource and Comparative Study

Anh Ngo, Nicolas Rollet, Catherine Pelachaud, Chloé Clavel


Abstract
Addressing the scarcity of annotated data for Other-Initiated Repair (OIR), when recipients interrupt conversation progressivity to signal trouble, prompting speakers to provide repair, this work introduces OIR annotations for the NOXI corpus, achieving considerable reliability. We evaluate whether LLMs can reliably annotate OIR sequences using structured Chain-of-Thought prompting and conduct comparative analysis across two corpora: NOXI (natural dialogue) and CABB-S (Dutch, task-oriented), finding weak alignment between LLMs and human annotations, particularly in recognizing trouble-signaling. Analyzing human-LLM disagreement using the LLM-generated explanations revealed limitations: models rely on lexical patterns rather than conversational context, construct reasonable-sounding but misleading narratives, highlighting crucial limitations for both automated annotation of complex interactional phenomena.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.547
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6880–6892
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.547/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anh Ngo, Nicolas Rollet, Catherine Pelachaud, and Chloé Clavel. 2026. Human vs LLM in Conversational Repair Annotation: A New Resource and Comparative Study. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:6880–6892.
Cite (Informal):
Human vs LLM in Conversational Repair Annotation: A New Resource and Comparative Study (Ngo et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.547.pdf
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 2026.lrec-main.547.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip