What is Data Labeling?

Who doesn’t love data? It’s like the treasure trove of tech geeks everywhere, just waiting to be mined for valuable insights. But how do you access that gold mine? The answer is simple – data labeling!

Data labeling lets you add essential metadata to all your datasets, unlocking plenty of valuable features, such as predictive analytics and machine learning (ML) models.

In this blog post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about data labeling so that you can start capitalizing on its power today!

What is Data Labeling?

Data Labeling is the process of identifying raw data and assigning relevant labels to provide helpful context.

Data labeling is an essential part of any data-driven system, but why?

• In machine learning models, labeled data allows the model to identify characteristics in the data and use it to distinguish one label from another. 
• By categorizing data in this way, the model can quickly build relationships between data points and infer conclusions from them.

On the other hand: 

• Unlabeled data does not carry any labels or categories and hence cannot be used as effectively by machines to train their models.

By assigning relevant labels to data points, computers can understand the data better and generate more accurate ML models. Labels help algorithms better categorize, detect and classify different aspects of data.

As a result, training machines on labeled data can yield more accurate results than relying solely on unlabeled data.

Labeling data is an essential part of the machine learning process as the data captured is used to train ML models and create data predictors.

• Companies deploy data annotators to structure and label data, creating a training data foundation that isolates data variables, allowing analysts to identify the most optimal data predictors for ML models.
• The data labels inform the ML models which data vectors should be used for model training; this enables the models to make better predictions. 

While data annotation can be done through machines, human intervention is still required for “human-in-the-loop” participation at various project stages, such as helping create, train, fine-tune, and test the ML model using datasets most beneficial to that specific project.

By properly labeling data, organizations can: 

• better analyze trends
• draw meaningful conclusions from data sets
• and develop new solutions for their business needs

For businesses, this means that they can use their data more effectively and efficiently to draw accurate conclusions. 

Data labeling is increasingly important in today’s digital world as organizations can access more data than ever.

Data Labeling Types

NLP (Natural Language Processing)

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of AI that combines computational linguistics and various machine learning, statistical, and deep learning models.

Specifically, in data labeling, NLP functions to identify and tag essential sections of the text which serve as the training data for: 

• analyzing sentiment
• recognizing entity names
• and optical character recognition

Because of its utility, NLP has been incorporated into enterprise solutions like: 

• chatbots
• voice-operated GPS systems
• virtual assistants
• text summarization
• speech recognition
• and spam detection.

The increased use of NLP has rendered it a fundamental component in modernizing major business operations. As businesses adapt to changing markets and technology evolves, data labeling with NLP will remain an important part of how businesses optimize the use of their resources.

Audio Processing

Audio processing, also known as speech recognition through Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves annotated audio and makes sounds more comprehensible for applications such as chatbots or virtual assistant devices.

Data labeling plays an important role in audio processing, as the structured format allows for a more complex data analysis.

• With the help of data labeling, audio files can be transcribed and transformed into written language so that machines can better understand them. 
• This task involves assigning tags and labels to the dataset, which helps machines gain insight into what the audio means.

In other words, this method makes it easier for virtual assistants and chatbots to understand what someone is saying via sound alone. NLP-based speech recognition models use labeled audio data to create highly accurate text transcripts essential for any speech-driven digital product.

Computer Vision

Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that uses training data to build models capable of recognizing objects and images.

Data labeling is an essential part of computer vision. This process feeds training data into models and algorithms that enable machines to identify what they see in images accurately.

Computer vision relies on data labeling to build a model that enables accurate:

• detection
• segmentation
• and categorization

Of an object within an image.

This technology makes possible a wide range of tasks in multiple industries, including energy,

utilities, manufacturing, and automotive.

Approaches to Data Labeling

Internal

Internal labeling, which large companies with expansive resources often employ, is an approach to data labeling involving in-house data science experts to assign labels and document progress for tracking purposes.

• This approach simplifies the tracking and organization of data and provides higher quality, more accurate results.
• However, there’s one major drawback: internal labeling takes much longer and is costlier than outsourcing to a third-party service provider.

Nonetheless, these larger businesses can benefit from their greater resources that allow them to employ skilled personnel in this pursuit.

Synthetic

Data labeling has become integral to data analytics and machine learning, but the data collection process can be time-consuming and expensive.

Synthetic labeling offers a solution by utilizing pre-existing data to generate new data labels while improving data quality.

There are many advantages to utilizing synthetic data labeling, including the following:

• expedited labeling process
• improved data quality
• increased accuracy

This approach saves costs in data collection and shortens data cleaning time.

However, synthetic labeling requires extensive computing power, resulting in higher operating costs that manufacturers must consider. 

Despite these potential extra expenses, synthetic labeling can help businesses harness data more effectively than ever before, unlocking immense business opportunities hidden within the data they collect.

Programmatic

Done manually, data labeling requires humans to read through large datasets of unlabeled data and assign each element a label or tag so that computer algorithms can comprehend what it means.

To make this process more efficient, companies have turned to programmatic-generated labels.

• Programmatic labeling allows data annotators to forget manual annotation and potentially speed up data labeling processes by orders of magnitude.
• This automated process utilizes scripts to reduce the time and effort required to label data, thus allowing businesses to save on labor costs.

Despite its automated process, this data labeling method is accompanied by an ever-present Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) quality assurance process to ensure that any possible technical issues are swiftly remedied.

HITL QA processes ensure that results are accurate and reliable, reducing the chances of failure while ensuring accuracy and quality at scale.

By eliminating tedious data labeling tasks, programmatic labeling makes progress much faster due to the time saved in data collection and storage processes.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing approaches to data labeling have become increasingly popular due to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

By leveraging the power of micro-tasking capabilities and web-based distribution, these platforms can quickly generate large datasets from a much larger pool of sources than what would be available using traditional methods.

QA and project management may vary across platforms, but one of the more famous examples of crowdsourced data labeling is reCaptcha. 

• This project sought to protect against bots while also improving image annotation accuracy through the input of many users.
• Instead of just verifying a user is human to access content, Recaptcha requires users to identify an object in a series of photos, such as a bus, or a stop light, to generate comprehensive labels for this data set.
• The result was a database filled with accurately labeled images that could be used for machine learning applications.

As greater numbers and diversity of humans provide more data labels, machine learning algorithms can better infer patterns, creating opportunities that improve processes and provide solutions to challenges far beyond what could be achieved without crowdsourcing.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing data labeling is often one of the most optimal management tools for high-level yet temporary projects which may require an influx of quick data.

• Even though freelancing platforms provide ample data about potential candidates, hiring managed data labeling teams can speed up the process, delivering pre-vetted staff and pre-built data labeling tools. 
• In addition to providing reduced selection times, data labeling teams often hold their staff to a higher standard – allowing companies to rest assured they receive quality work promptly.

While it may require a time investment upfront, establishing a freelance workflow can allow employers to benefit from the advantages of outsourcing without the responsibility of recruiting, training, and managing data labelers.

This approach allows employers more control over their data labeling project and peace of mind throughout the duration.

Data Labeling Benefits

Better Predictions

Data labeling is a critical step to ensure the accuracy of machine learning models.

• Labeling data ensures that data closely reflects real-world scenarios, thus allowing the model to deliver precise results.
• Without data labels, information fed into your model would be vague, resulting in an unreliable output.

As data labeling is a tedious process requiring excellent attention to detail, it’s important to have knowledgeable data scientists who can accurately label data and give the model the right input it needs to make accurate predictions.

An incorrect or incomplete data set can lead to an inaccurate output, so having a proper data labeling system is key for ensuring your machine learning algorithms can develop precise models.

Data labeling ensures that AI algorithms operate with optimal accuracy and data fidelity.

Better Data Usability

The data labeling process is an invaluable part of data usability and model optimization. 

• By reclassifying categorical data into binary data, data-driven models can become more visually consumable by users.
• This reduces the number of data variables needed for modeling and enables control variables to be included in further analysis.
• When it comes to data utilization for machine learning purposes, classification like this has come to define how tasks such as computer vision or natural language processing are completed.

Of course, data labeling is only one part of an effective data strategy.

Ensuring that computer vision and natural language processing models are fed with high-quality data remains an enormous priority for businesses looking to optimize their predictive capabilities.

Data labeling ensures an accurate data set that will move these models on their journey.

Data Labeling Best Practices

Active Learning

Active learning is a category of ML algorithms and a subset of semi-supervised learning with the benefits of data labeling without the high cost.

Active learning identifies appropriate datasets for humans by using approaches such as: 

• membership query synthesis
• pool-based sampling
• and stream-based selective sampling

Through these approaches, active learning can: 

• generate synthetic instances and request labels for them
• rank all unlabeled instances
• and select the best queries to annotate.

Active learning helps individuals create a better-trained model with fewer labeled training examples when compared with traditional machine learning algorithms.

Label Audits

Label auditing is a critical part of data labeling, as it allows organizations to verify that labels have been applied correctly and ensure they remain up to date.

By regularly auditing data labels, label scientists can: 

• catch errors before they become larger issues
• improve data accuracy
• simplify data retrieval
• ensure that data remains properly labeled and managed

Label audits are especially important for data in rapidly changing fields, such as finance or healthcare, where data can become outdated quickly.

Regular label auditing safeguards outdated or incorrectly labeled data points from slipping through the cracks.

Label Consensus

Label consensus is a way to measure the rate of agreement between multiple data labelers, both machine and human.

With this metric, data analysts can calculate a consensus score by dividing the sum of agreeing labels by the total number of labels they have assigned per asset.

This allows data scientists to confidently assess the accuracy and consistency of their data labeling process.

By achieving a high agreement rate between labelers on data labeling tasks, data sets can be labeled more quickly and accurately.

Transfer Learning

Transfer learning greatly reduces data labeling time and effort by allowing pre-trained models from one dataset to be transferred and adapted for use with another data set.

This approach is useful in many tasks, including multi-task learning, which requires multiple data processes to learn simultaneously.

• While traditional machine learning techniques involve collecting data, pre-processing it, labeling data, training the model, and so on, transfer learning can bypass some of these steps.
• Using data from other trained models can save hours of data collection, pre-processing, and labeling hours. Transfer learning is especially useful when data sets are sparse or low quality.
• Interestingly, multi-task learning takes it one step further by training models combining multiple tasks simultaneously, such as image detection and foreign language translation.

From a data analysis perspective, transfer learning offers a great resource as it saves data labeling time while providing accurate analytics results. 

Instead of spending hours creating data labels, transfer learning makes data analysis faster, more efficient, and more accurate.

Intuitive Streamlined Task Interfaces

Data labeling is a crucial task that requires the right tools and technology to accomplish successfully.

• Intuitive and streamlined task interfaces allow human labelers to quickly switch between tasks with minimal frustration, reducing the mental load of data labeling. 
• Context switching is nearly seamless, as data labeling can now be easily integrated into workstreams without adjusting settings whenever a user moves from one task to another.

By simplifying data labeling, intuitive and streamlined task interfaces are essential for ensuring accuracy, efficiency, and quality in data collection and analysis.

Data Labeling Conclusion

Data labeling has become increasingly important as data-driven decisions become more prevalent in the business landscape.

Business data is the fuel for data-driven technologies, and data labeling is essential for data ingestion and training machine learning models.

An effective data labeling strategy requires standardization, organization, and quality control processes to ensure data can drive true business value.

By bringing together a team of experts with diverse skill sets, data owners can create data labeling strategies that enable their data to be leveraged in innovative ways.

With proper data labeling techniques, businesses of every size can turn their data into an asset that will last for years.

Now we’d like to hear from you; how have you implemented data labeling into your organization? What techniques do you use to ensure data labeling accuracy, quality, and efficiency? Share your stories in the comments section below! 

Data Labeling FAQ