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Background: Deep learning methods, where models do not use explicit features and instead rely on implicit features estimated during model training, suffer from an explainability problem. In text classification, saliency maps that reflect the importance of words in prediction are one approach toward explainability. However, little is known about whether the salient words agree with those identified by humans as important. Objectives: The current study examines in‐line annotations from human annotators and saliency map annotations from a deep learning model (ELECTRA transformer) to understand how well both humans and machines provide evidence for their assigned label. Methods: Data were responses to test items across a mix of United States subjects, states, and grades. Humans were trained to annotate responses to justify a crisis alert label and two model interpretability methods (LIME, Integrated Gradients) were used to obtain engine annotations. Human inter‐annotator agreement and engine agreement with the human annotators were computed and compared. Results and Conclusions: Human annotators agreed with one another at similar rates to those observed in the literature on similar tasks. The annotations derived using the integrated gradients (IG) agreed with human annotators at higher rates than LIME on most metrics; however, both methods underperformed relative to the human annotators. Implications: Saliency map‐based engine annotations show promise as a form of explanation, but do not reach human annotation agreement levels. Future work should examine the appropriate unit for annotation (e.g., word, sentence), other gradient based methods, and approaches for mapping the continuous saliency values to Boolean annotations. Lay Description: What is known about subject matter: Explainability of deep learning models is complicated by their large size, design, and complexity.Explainability methods in deep learning exist but have not been rigorously tested.Saliency maps, as a form of explainability, can be used to generate engine annotations.Human annotations can serve as basis for comparison. What paper adds to knowledge: How well human annotations work in one domain (crisis paper identification).How well two engine annotation methods match human annotations. Implications of study findings: Human annotations have reasonable reliability.Engine annotations have lower reliability than humans.Model‐based engine annotations perform better than model‐agnostic engine annotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]