Appen Enhances Its AI Training Platform

Appen, a provider of datasets used to train artificial intelligence systems, today introduced feature updates for its AI training data solution.

The Appen platform for collecting and labeling images, text, speech, audio, and video combines Figure Eight's machine learning (ML)-enabled annotation tools and self-serve client workspaces with Appen Connect to oversee Appen's global multilingual crowd of more than 1 million contractors and a wide range of managed services.

The feature enhancements include the following:

• Machine Learning-Assisted Text Annotation to locate and classify named entity mentions in unstructured text into predefined categories to support entity extraction and span labeling use cases. Users can also now leverage bring-your-own-model outputs to accelerate contributor annotations. Machine Learning-Assisted Text Annotation helps natural language processing (NLP) teams scale quality human annotations.
• Machine Learning-Assisted Text Utterance Collection with machine learning validators to collect unique text utterances across domains. Text utterance collection jobs allow users to leverage a distributed workforce of fluent annotators to collect text strings based on prompts or scenarios to power conversational agents.
• Enterprise Analytics, providing in-platform reporting on organizational usage.

"AI can't function and improve without a constant stream of large volumes of high-quality training data, a market that will be worth up to $19 billion (10 percent of the overall AI market) by 2025," said Appen's chief technology officer, Wilson Pang, in a statement. "To ensure our customers can continue to develop accurate, powerful AI products and services, we are constantly enhancing our solution with new features to help them meet their data needs today and into the future."