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Comments and notifications

Comments are a Label Studio Enterprise feature that allows communication between reviewers and annotators:

Annotators Reviewers

Annotator to reviewer communication

  • Ask for clarification on a task
  • Provide reasoning or context for their annotation

Reviewer to annotator communication

  • Answer questions
  • Give feedback to help the annotator improve

This annotator-reviewer feedback loop is an important tool in your review workflow, allowing you to:

  • Speed up the labeling process
  • Increase the annotation quality
  • Build more solid labeling and review processes

Screenshot of comments

Permissions

All users have the following commenting permissions for any annotations that they would otherwise have access to view:

  • View the Comments panel and read previous comments.
  • Add new comments.

Additional permissions are as follows:

Action Annotator Reviewer and higher roles
Add comment true true
View comment true true
Resolve/unresolve own comment true true
Resolve/unresolve other comments false true
Delete own comment true true
Delete other comments false false
Link/unlink own comment true true
Link/unlink other comments false false

Add a comment

You can add comments from the Comments panel when viewing an annotation. All users have access to the Comments panel.

Screenshot of comments

You can link your comment to a specific area within an annotation.

This can be a region (for example, a bounding box or a span of text) or it can be a field (for example, a classification).

Gif of linking a comment

Note the following:

  • You can link comments to fields within the labeling configuration. However, if the field is a classification, choice, or taxonomy, you can only attach a comment if there is already a selection.
  • You can only link comments to an entire text area. You cannot link comments to regions within text areas.
  • Linking is not supported for Ranker or Pairwise fields.

Comment actions

The actions you can perform depend on your user role permissions and whether it’s your comment. You can access comment actions from the overflow menu:

Screenshot of comment action menu

Filter for comments

The Data Manager has several columns to display comment information:

Column Description View permissions
Comment texts The text in the comment. All user roles
Comments Total number of comments for a particular task. All user roles
Unresolved comments Total number of comments that are not yet resolved. All user roles
Commented at The date and time at which the comment was made. All user roles except Annotator
Commented authors User who wrote comments. All user roles except Annotator

note

Users in the Reviewer or Annotator role must be granted access to view the Data Manager. You can grant access in the project settings.

Require comments

You can configure the project so that annotators and reviewers are required to leave comments after taking specific actions:

Comment notifications

To see notifications, click your user profile icon in the upper right.

Use the overflow menu to mark notifications as read or unread.

Screenshot of notifications

note

Notifications that have already been read are denoted with a gray background.

Annotators

Annotators can write comments on their own annotations.

Sent notifications

When an annotator writes a comment, the users who are notified depend on whether it is the first comment on the annotation:

  • If this is the first comment on an annotation, then all users within a project that have the role of Reviewer or higher see the comment in their notification list.
  • If this comment is in response to an ongoing discussion within the comments panel, then only users who are have added comments to the annotation will see a notification.

Received notifications

An annotator receives a notification any time another user leaves a comment on one of their annotations.

Reviewers and other users

Reviewers can write comments on annotations that they are reviewing. This applies to users with the Reviewer, Manager, Admin, and Owner role.

Sent notifications

When a reviewer writes a comment, then the users who are notified depend on their role and whether they have also left comments:

  • Annotators get a notification for all comments on the annotations they created.
  • If other users have also left comments on the annotation (for example, if multiple users are reviewing the annotation), then they will also be notified when a new comment appears.

Received notifications

A reviewer receives a notification when:

  • If the comment is the first comment on an annotation, then all users within a project that have the role of Reviewer or higher see the comment in their notification list.
  • If you have already left a comment on an annotation, you receive a notification when any user, regardless of role, adds a new comment.