Choosing Your Ideal Text Annotation Tool

Finding the ideal text annotation tools for your projects is a difficult task due to a large number of accessible platforms and the lack of an up-to-date list of their features, along with their benefits and drawbacks.

So where should I begin my search? Which platform is the most user-friendly? Which of the available tools is the most efficient while remaining cost-effective?

In this article, we’ll examine some of the top text annotation tools for personal and professional use.

The most crucial factors to consider are the tool’s availability, functionality, and pricing.

• Each tool has a specific purpose and functionalities, and there will be multiple solutions for each necessity depending on your annotation project goals.
• The pricing and availability of free packages or downloadable and online Web applications are the first factors to consider when selecting which tool is ideal for you.

Therefore, you should preferably start by going through previous reviews of the available tools to avoid making wrong choices that can lead to an unnecessary waste of money and time. For example, installing or converting documents to a specific format and then having to turn them into another tool’s format can sometimes mean having to re-train your team on using yet another tool.

Or, you can simply read the rest of this article, in which we will go over the top text annotation platforms!

Whether you’re an annotator or new to the field, we’ll walk you through the key features of each of the following text annotation platforms to assist you in making the right decision.

1. UBIAI

UBIAI is a powerful labeling platform for training and deploying custom NLP models.

It offers free and paid plans, OCR annotation tools, document classification, team collaboration Auto Labeling features, and more.

It is an absolute necessity for any company or organization that has to create high-quality annotations, especially for PDFs, since they are frequently used in the corporate world to deliver essential information, but they can be challenging to edit.

With UBIAI, you can simply annotate native PDF documents, scanned images, pictures, invoices, or contracts in over 20 languages, including Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew, while keeping the layout of the documents and making modifications without having to worry about compatibility with other programs.

UBIAI’s best features :

• Performs Named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction, and document classification all in the same interface.
• Deals with semi-structured text while preserving the document’s layout.
• Supports OCR annotation for more than 20 languages.
• Exports annotations in multiple formats such as spacy, IOB, Amazon comprehend, etc.
• Supports different formats such as native PDF, TXT, CSV, PNG, JPG, HTML, DOCX, JSON,etc.
• Provides team management features that allow tracking the progression of text annotation, the performance of the assigned project, and the measuring of inter-annotator agreements.

Cons,

• The unavailability of audio and image annotation (coming soon!)
• Supports only text annotation

2. Tagtog

Tagtog is an AI-enabled text annotation tool that allows you to extract relevant insights from texts in an automated manner.

This way, you can detect certain patterns, identify challenges, and find relevant solutions as well.

Tagtog’s best features :

• Compatible with multiple file formats like CSV, HTML, PDF, TXT.
• Supports various languages like Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, English, and Arabic.
• Provides document classification and entity annotation.

Cons,

• The absence of some specialty tools from the interface.
• No OCR annotation features
• Less intuitive UI

3. Doccano

Doccano is an open-source text annotation tool that includes features for text classification, sequence labeling, and sequence-to-sequence operations. Labeled data can be generated for sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarizing, and other applications.

Doccano’s best features :

• Multi-language support.
• Mobile support.
• Emoji support.
• Text and image annotation
• Good UI
• Free

Cons,

• Self-hosted, no cloud support
• Does not support OCR annotation
• Lack of team collaboration features
• No API support

4. Datasaur

Datasaur allows users to manage their complete data labeling procedure by using a single tool. It employs artificial intelligence to assist people in labeling text data more efficiently for NLP.

Datasaur’s best features:

• Powerful extensions enable scalable work.
• The built-in intelligence detects costly errors.
• Audio annotation
• Team management.
• Good UI

Cons,

• Unavailability of OCR annotation feature
• Limited annotation export formats
• Only a few upload formats are supported
• Limited model fine-tuning options: does not support relation extraction and invoice auto-labeling
• Expensive

5. Prodigy

Prodigy is a scriptable tool that enables data scientists to perform annotations on their own. This enables the rapid iteration of a new level. Transfer learning technologies will allow you to train production-quality models with a small number of samples by taking a more agile approach to data collection.

Prodigy’s best features:

• The web application is flexible, powerful, and follows modern UX principles.
• Designed for users to focus on one decision at a time.
• Integrates well with spaCy
• Support text, image, audio, and video annotation
• Pipeline customization

Cons,

• No team collaboration feature
• No OCR annotation
• Self-hosted

There is no one correct or incorrect choice when it comes to annotation tools because each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and that’s what makes finding the right tool for your project complicated.

But with enough research, you can be confident that you are making an accurate decision based on almost everything you or your organization needs to finalize your annotation project optimally.