Manual Annotation

Generative AI Lab is optimized to keep human experts productive, minimizing manual effort by streamlining the annotation interface. Features such as keyboard shortcuts, task auto-navigation, and visual clarity are all designed to support efficient annotation.

Generative AI Lab supports keyboard shortcuts for all types of annotations. It enables having one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse, and both eyes on the screen at all times. One-click completion and automatic switching to the next task keep experts in the loop.

Interface Overview

• Top Panel: Displays all project-defined labels.
• Center Panel: Shows the content of the current task.
• Right Panel Widgets:
  • Annotations
  • Versions
  • Progress

Labeling Widgets

Completions

A completion is a list of annotations manually defined by a user for a given task. After completing annotation on a task (e.g., all entities highlighted in the text, or one or more classes is assigned to the task in the case of classification projects) user clicks on the Save button to save their progress or Submit button to submit the completion.

A submitted completion is no longer editable, and the user cannot delete it. Creating a new copy of the submitted completion is the only option to edit it. An annotator can modify or delete their completions only if completions are not submitted yet.

Dedicated action icons are available on the completions widgets to allow users to quickly run actions like delete, copy, set ground-truth.

It is an important to ensure a complete audit trail of all user actions. Generative AI Lab tracks the history and details of any deleted completions. It means it is possible to see the name of the completion creator, date of creation, and deletion.

Predictions

A prediction is a list of annotations created automatically by Spark NLP pre-trained models or from the rules. A project owner/manager can create predictions using the Pre-Annotate button from the Tasks page. Predictions are read-only, which means users can see the predictions but cannot modify those.

To reuse a prediction to bootstrap the annotation process, users can copy it to a new completion. This new completion bootstrapped from the prediction is editable.

Confidence

Each predicted annotation includes a confidence score, helping users assess reliability. This score shows the confidence the model has for each of the labeled chunks it predicts. It is calculated based on the benchmarking information of the model used to pre-annotate and the score of each prediction. The confidence score is available when working on Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Assertion, and Classification projects and is also generated when using Rules.

On the Labeling page, when selecting the Prediction widget, users can see all preannotation in the Annotations section with a score assigned to them. Using the confidence slider, users can filter out low confidence labels before starting to edit/correct the labels. Both Accept Prediction and Add a new completion based on this prediction operation apply to the filtered annotations from the confidence slider.

Enable Bulk Hiding of Labels

Users can hide multiple labels at once, significantly improving efficiency when working with large datasets.

The eye icon on the Annotations widget, enables users to hide all labels within selected groups with a single click. To use this feature, users must switch from Region View to Labels View in the annotation widget.

Annotations

The Annotations widget has two sections.

Regions

• Gives a list overview of all annotated chunks. When you click on any annotation, it gets automatically highlighted in the labeling editor. We can edit or remove annotations from here.

Relations

• Lists all the relations that have been created. When the user moves the mouse over any one relation, it is highlighted in the labeling editor.

Progress Tracking

Annotator/Reviewer can see their overall work progress from within the labeling page. The status is calculated for their assigned work.

For Annotator View:

For Reviewer View:

Enhanced Comparison View for Completion Differences

Annotators and managers can easily compare two completions side-by-side. This significantly simplifies the process of identifying differences between versions as they are automatically highlighted.

How to Use:

• Step 1: Click on the Comparison View button.
• Step 2: Select the two completions you want to compare.
• Step 3: Click on Show Diff.

The Diff View will then open, displaying the differences between the two completions. Annotations that differ are highlighted, with green indicating the annotation in base completion and red indicating the annotations in compared completion.

Benefits:

• Efficiency and Clarity: Automatically highlighting differences saves time and reduces the potential for human error in identifying discrepancies. Also, the visual differentiation between annotations makes it easy to understand what changes have been made.
• Collaboration: Facilitates better communication between annotators and project managers by clearly showing where differences occur.

This feature enhances the accuracy and efficiency of the annotation process, ensuring that all team members can easily identify and address any inconsistencies between completions.

Text Annotation

Named Entity Recognition

To extract information using NER labels, we first click on the label to select it or press the shortcut key assigned to it, and then, with the mouse, select the relevant part of the text. We can easily edit the incorrect labeling by clicking on the labeled text and then selecting the new label you want to assign to this text.

To delete the label from the text, we first click on the text on the labeling editor and then press backspace.

Trim leading and ending special characters in annotated chunks

When annotating text, it is possible and probable that the annotation is not very precise and the chunks contain leading/trailing spaces and punctuation marks. By default all the leading/trailing spaces and punctuation marks are excluded from the annotated chunk. The labeling editor settings has a new configuration option that can be used to enable/disable this feature if necessary.

Assertion Labels

To add an assertion label to an extracted entity, select the assertion label and select the labeled entity (from NER) in the labeling editor. After this, the extracted entity will have two labels - one for NER and one for assertion. In the example below, the chunks heart disease, kidney disease, stroke etc., were extracted first using the NER label - Symptom (pink color) and then the assertion label - Absent (green color).

Relation Extraction

Creating relations with the Generative AI Lab is very simple. First, click on any one labeled entity, then press the r key and click on the second labeled entity.

You can add a label to the relation, change its direction or delete it using the contextual menu displayed next to the relation arrow or from the relation box.

Cross page Annotation

Generative AI Lab supports cross-page NER annotation for Text projects. It means that Annotators can annotate a chunk starting at the bottom of one page and finishing on the next page. This feature is also available for Relations. The way to do this is to first change the pagination settings to include the tokens to be linked on the same page, then create the relation annotation between the tokens and finally go back to the original pagination settings. The annotation is presented through connectors after updating the pagination.

Visual NER Annotation

Annotating text included in image documents (e.g., scanned documents) is a common use case in many verticals but comes with several challenges. With the Visual NER labeling config, we aim to ease the work of annotators by allowing them to select text from an image and assign the corresponding label to it.

This feature is powered by Visual NLP library; hence a valid Visual NLP license is required to get access to it.

Here is how we can use it:

1. Upload a valid [Visual NLP](/docs/en/ocr) license. See how to do this here.
2. Create a new project, specify a name for your project, add team members if necessary, and from the list of predefined templates (Default Project Configs) choose Visual NER Labeling under IMAGE content type.
3. Update the configuration if necessary. This might be useful if you want to use other labels than the default ones. Click the Save Config button. While saving the project, a confirmation dialog is displayed to ask if you want to deploy the OCR pipeline. Select Yes from the confirmation dialog.
4. Import the tasks you want to annotate (images or PDF documents).
5. Start annotating text on top of the image by clicking on the text tokens, or by drawing bounding boxes on top of chunks or image areas.
6. Export annotations in your preferred format.

The entire process is illustrated below:

Redesigned Annotation Interface for NER Projects

The annotation widget interface has been streamlined for Text and Visual NER project types. This update focuses on enhancing clarity, reducing visual clutter, and improving overall usability, without altering the core workflow. All previously available data remains intact in the exported JSON, even if not shown in the UI.

Cleaner interface layout

• Removed redundant or non-essential data from the annotation view.
• Grouped the Meta section visually to distinguish it clearly and associate the delete button specifically with metadata entries.
• Default confidence scores display (1.00) with green highlighting.
• Hover functionality on labeled text reveals text ID.

Support for multi-page PDF documents

When a valid Visual NLP license is available, Generative AI Lab offers support for multi-page PDF annotation. We can import, annotate, and export multi-page PDF files easily.

Users have two options for importing a new PDF file into the Visual NER project:

1. Import PDF file from local storage.
2. Add a link to the PDF file in the file attribute.

After import, the task becomes available on the Tasks Page. The title of the new task is the name of the imported file. On the labeling page, the PDF viewer has pagination support so that annotators can annotate on the PDF document one page at a time.

Users can also jump to a specific page in multi-page task, instead of passing through all pages to reach a target section of a PDF document.

Support for multiple OCR servers

Just like for Preannotation servers, Generative AI Lab supports deployment of multiple OCR servers. If a user has uploaded a Visual NLP license, OCR inference is enabled.

To work on a Visual NER project, users have to deploy at least one OCR server. Any OCR server can perform preannotation. To select the OCR server, users need to go to the Import page, click on the OCR Server button on the top-right corner and from the popup, choose one of the available OCR servers. If no suitable OCR server is present, you can create a new server by selecting the Create Server option and then clicking on the Deploy button.