In the text analytics industry, annotator is a term used to refer to a person who provides labels or annotations for data. Annotators may also provide other types of labels, such as named entity recognition tags, which identify entities such as people, places, organizations, and so on. This can be done manually, through a process of manual review, or automatically, through the use of algorithms.
Software used for annotation purposes is also known as annotation tools. Some examples of annotation tools used in the text analytics industry include Brat, Prodigy, and Label Studio.
Functions of Annotators
Annotators play a critical role in the text analytics process, as they are responsible for providing the data that will be used to train and evaluate models. Without annotators, it would be impossible to develop accurate models.
There are several different ways that annotators can label data, including:
- Manually reviewing data and applying labels
- Using algorithms to automatically label data
- Applying pre-defined rules to label data
The choice of annotation method will depend on the type of data being labeled, the resources available, and the desired accuracy of the models.
Tasks of Annotators
Annotators may be responsible for a variety of tasks, including:
- Determining the category of a piece of text
- Assigning a sentiment score to a piece of text
- Identifying named entities in a piece of text
- Locating specific terms or phrases in a piece of text
- Annotators may also be responsible for other tasks, such as providing feedback on the accuracy of models or participating in user studies.
Different Types of Annotator Software
- CAS2JDBC annotator. The CAS2JDBC annotator allows for the conversion of a CAS object to a JDBC ResultSet.
- Language Identification annotator. The Language Identification annotator detects the language of a CAS.
- Linguistic Analysis annotator. The Linguistic Analysis annotator performs various linguistic analyses on the CAS.
- Named Entity Recognition annotator. The Named Entity Recognition annotator identifies named entities in the CAS.
- Dictionary Lookup annotator. The Dictionary Lookup annotator looks up terms in a dictionary.
- Pattern Matcher annotator. The Pattern Matcher annotator detects patterns in the CAS.
- UIMA Regular Expression Annotator. The UIMA Regular Expression annotator detects patterns using regular expressions.