What Data Looks like

In LightTag, an example is a single unit to be annotated. An example could be a tweet, a message in a conversation, an abstract from a paper or an entire document. An example is an isolated unit of annotation, that is an annotation can not span multiple examples, rather a single annotation must be contained in one example.

In the annotation UI a single example would like this:

An example in the UI

If you’ve defined Contextual Display so that multiple examples are shown together, it would look like this:

Multiple examples

Example Metadata

Text data doesn’t live in isolation, and often we have additional fields of text that we’d like to keep for further analysis as well as display to our annotator to provide more context.

For example, you’d like to show the speaker name when annotating a conversation, or the publication name when annotating an article.

As described in the Supported Dataset Formats section, you’ll upload an individual example as a JSON object, which allows you to upload arbitrary data in essentially arbitrary shapes. LightTag will

  1. Store this metadata alongside your example

  2. Display it to your annotator

  3. Return it to you when you retrieve annotations (to spare you a join)