Training Data for Natural Language Processing

Training Data for Natural Language Processing
10 min read
13 October 2023

The spoken words you use in regular interactions with other people are known as natural language. Machines could not comprehend it not long ago. However, data scientists are already working on artificial intelligence systems that can comprehend natural language, opening the door to enormous potential and future advances.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Software with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities can read, understand, interpret, and respond meaningfully to natural human language. The goal of NLP, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, is to educate computers to process data and solve problems in a manner that is similar to or even superior to human intelligence.

Deep learning and rule-based language models are used with AI and machine learning (ML) technology in NLP applications. By utilizing these technologies, NLP software can process spoken and written human language, identify the speaker’s intent or attitude, and provide insightful responses that aid the speaker in reaching their objectives.

Main NLP use cases

Text Analysis

Text analysis can be performed on several levels including morphological, grammatical, syntactic, and semantic analyses. Businesses may better organize their data and find insightful patterns and insights by analyzing text and extracting various types of essential elements, such as themes, individuals, dates, locations, etc. For online retailers, this is quite helpful. In addition to using customer reviews to determine what features customers like and dislike about a product, they can use text analysis to improve product searchability and classification.

Chatbots

NLP will be integrated with Machine Learning, Big Data, and other technologies, according to Gartner, to create potent chatbots and other question-answering systems. Contextual chatbots, smart assistants, and conversational AI, in particular, enable businesses to accelerate digital transformation in areas that are people- and customer-focused.

Monitoring social networks

A bad review going viral on social media may ruin a brand’s reputation, as many marketers and business owners are well aware. Applications using natural language processing (NLP) can assist track brand mentions on social media, identifying unfavorable opinions, and generating actionable alerts.

Intelligent document processing

A technology known as intelligent document processing automatically pulls data from various documents and formats it according to the specifications. To find important information in the document, classify it, and extract it into a common output format, it uses NLP and computer vision.

Speech recognition

The phonetic map of the spoken text is created by machines, which then analyze which word combinations meet the model. With the use of language modeling, it examines the entire context to determine which word should come next. Virtual assistants and tools for creating subtitles are mostly powered by this technology.

Preparing an NLP dataset

Successful NLP depends on high-quality training data. How amazing is data, though? The volume of data is crucial for machine learning, and even more so for deep learning. At the same time, you want to ensure that the quality is not compromised as a result of your focus on scale.

Algorithms are trained using data to gain knowledge. It’s a good thing you’ve kept those customer transcripts for the last ten years, isn’t it? The data you’ve saved probably isn’t nearly ready to be used by machine learning algorithms yet. Usually, you need to enrich or classify the data you wish to use.

Why is training data important?

Depending on the needs of a project, training data is a sort of data used to instruct a new application, model, or system to start identifying patterns. Data used for training in AI or ML is slightly different since it is tagged or annotated using specific methods to make it understandable to computers.

This training data collection aids computer algorithms in their search for connections, cognitive development, decision-making, and confidential assessment. And the better the training data is, the better the model performs.

In actuality, rather than the magical machine learning algorithms themselves, your data project’s success depends more on the quality and amount of your training data. For initiatives involving language understanding, this is exponentially true.

How Much Training Data Is Enough?

There’s really no hard-and-fast rule around how much data you need. Different use cases, after all, will require different amounts of data. Ones where you need your model to be incredibly confident (like self-driving cars) will require vast amounts of data, whereas a fairly narrow sentiment model that’s based on text necessitates far less data.

Annotation for Natural language data

Your language data sets cannot be magically transformed into training data sets that machine learning algorithms can utilize to start making predictions. Currently, the process of data annotation and labeling requires humans in order to categorize and identify information. A machine learning system will struggle to forecast characteristics that allow for spoken or written language interpretation without these labels. Without people in the loop, machines are unable to perform annotation.

The process of labeling any kind of data is complex. It is possible to manage this entire process in excel spreadsheets but this easily becomes overwhelming with all that needs to be in place:

1. Quality assurance for data labeling

2. Process iteration, such as changes in data feature selection, task progression, or QA

3. Management of data labelers

4. Training of new team members

5. Project planning, process operationalization, and measurement of success

Types of annotations in a natural language data set

Named Entity Recognition

Entity annotation is the act of locating and labeling mentions of named entities within a piece of text data. This includes identification of entities in a paragraph(like a person, organization, date, location, time, etc.), and further classifying them into categories according to the need.

Part-of-speech tagging

Part-of-speech tagging is the task that involves marking up words in a sentence as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and other descriptors.

Summarization

Summarization is the task that includes text shortening by identifying the important parts and creating a summary. It involves creating a brief description that includes the most important and relevant information contained in the text.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the task that implies a broad range of subjective analysis to identify positive or negative feelings in a sentence, the sentiment of a customer review, judging mood via written text or voice analysis, and other similar tasks.

Text classification

Text classification is the task that involves assigning tags/categories to text according to the content. Text classifiers can be used to structure, organize, and categorize any text. Placing text into organized groups and labeling it, based on features of interest.

Audio Transcription

The method of translating spoken language into written language is known as audio transcription. TagX offers transcription services in a variety of fields, including e-commerce, legal, medical, and technology. In addition to our regular audio transcription services, we also provide add-ons like quicker turnaround times, multilingual audio, time stamping, speaker identification, and support for different file types.

Audio Classification

Audio classification is the process to classify audio based on language, dialect, semantics, and other features. Audio classification is used in numerous natural language processing applications like chatbots, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and more. Human annotators determine its content and classify it into a series of predetermined categories. Our curated crowd can accurately label and categorize your audio in the language of your choice.

Audio Translation

TagX offers to translate your large content into multiple languages for your application. Translation helps you to attract the attention of potential clients, create an internationally recognized product, and turn customers into evangelists for your brand across the globe. We combine human translations with rigorous quality checks to ensure that every sentence meets your high standards.

Who does the labeling?

Companies spend five times as much on internal data labeling as they do with third parties, according to Cognilytica research. This is not only expensive, but it also consumes a lot of team members’ time when they could be using their skills in other ways. Additionally, developing the appropriate processes, pipelines, and annotation tools generally takes more time than some ML initiatives.

Organizations use a combination of software, processes, and people to clean, structure, or label data. In general, you have four options for your data labeling workforce:

Employees – They are on your payroll, either full-time or part-time. Their job description may not include data labeling.

Managed teams – You use vetted, trained, and actively managed data labelers. TagX offers complete Data Solutions right from collection to labeling to tweaking datasets for better performance.

Contractors – They are temporary or freelance workers.

Crowdsourcing – You use a third-party platform to access large numbers of workers at once.

Final Thoughts

Machine learning is an iterative process. Data labeling evolves as you test and validate your models and learn from their outcomes, so you’ll need to prepare new datasets and enrich existing datasets to improve your algorithm’s results.

Your data labeling team should have the flexibility to incorporate changes that adjust to your end users’ needs, changes in your product, or the addition of new products. A flexible data labeling team can react to changes in the business environment, data volume, task complexity, and task duration. The more adaptive your labeling team is, the more machine learning projects you can work through.

 

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