Linguistic annotation services. Labels by linguists, not guesswork.
Language models are fluent in the varieties they saw most and brittle everywhere else. eeko commissions credentialed linguists, phoneticians, and field researchers to produce the transcription, glossing, parsing, and dialect labels those models never got, under a written scheme, with consent and provenance recorded on every item.
What are linguistic annotation services?
Linguistic annotation services turn raw speech and text into data that carries its own structure: an IPA transcription with tone and stress, a word segmented into morphemes and glossed, a sentence parsed into a tree, a passage tagged for the dialect and register of the person who produced it. The labels are the product. They are what lets a model learn that two surface forms share a root, that a rising contour changes meaning, or that a regional feature is a feature and not a mistake.
Most of this work has historically been done by graduate students on a grant, or by general transcription vendors who were never asked to tell a glottal stop from silence. The first runs out of funding; the second produces labels that look complete and are quietly wrong. Neither leaves a record of who decided what, and neither answers the question a legal team will eventually ask: did the speaker agree to this use?
eeko's data practice exists because the models we deploy for regulated enterprises depend on data nobody has published. For language, that means linguists with the right training, a scheme written down before the first item is labeled, a second linguist checking the first, and a verifiable record on every recording and every label. It is one field within our AI training data practice, and it feeds directly into our speech and audio datasets and multilingual datasets.
Linguistic data for AI, layer by layer.
Six kinds of work, each scoped to a written scheme and proven on a pilot batch. Combine them or order one layer on data you already hold.
What a speech and language model never learned.
The gaps are predictable. They appear wherever structure is dense and published data is thin, and no amount of scraped web text fills them.
Five failures a linguist catches on sight
- Tokenizers against morphology — a single polysynthetic word becomes a dozen meaningless fragments, and the model never sees the root it shares with its neighbors.
- Tone and stress dropped — transcription that ignores pitch collapses distinct words into one, so the model learns a language that does not exist.
- Variation treated as error — a model trained on the standard variety flags a regional speaker as ungrammatical and quietly rewrites them.
- Literal pragmatics — an indirect request, a hedge, or a politeness formula is read at face value and the response misses the point.
- Scheme drift — three annotators, three conventions, one corpus that disagrees with itself. The labels look complete and train nothing.
The fix is the same each time: the right specialist, a written scheme, and a second linguist.
Consent, provenance, and review on every recording.
A voice is personal data and a transcription is a judgment call. Both need a record that survives an audit, a licence negotiation, or a speaker's question a year later.
Paid remote work for linguists, in your subfield.
The eeko expert network pays linguists to do the analysis they were trained for: transcribe, gloss, parse, describe variation, and review a colleague. Rate, scope, and deadline are stated on every job before you accept it.
You do not need every item on this list. One or two, verified, is enough to receive matching jobs.
- Degree Graduate training in linguistics or a neighboring field
- Phonetics Confident narrow transcription in the IPA
- Subfield Syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, or sociolinguistics
- Fieldwork Documentation experience with less-resourced languages
- Languages Native or near-native command beyond English
Every job comes with written guidelines and a reviewer. Approved batches are credited to your account and paid out automatically.
- Transcribe IPA with tone, stress, and prosody, aligned to consented audio
- Gloss and parse Segment words and annotate sentence structure
- Label variation Tag dialect, register, and pragmatic features; grade model readings
- Review Check another linguist's work before it ships
From a language brief to a signed delivery.
Fixed price per accepted item, agreed after the pilot. No volume order until your team has checked real output against the scheme.
Linguistic annotation questions.
What is linguistic annotation?
Linguistic annotation adds structured labels to speech or text that describe its sound, form, structure, or meaning: an IPA transcription of a recording, a gloss that splits a word into morphemes, a parse tree for a sentence, or a tag for the dialect a speaker uses. Done by trained linguists under a written scheme, it gives a model structure it cannot infer from raw tokens and gives an evaluation set labels you can trust.
How much do linguistic annotation services cost?
Price depends on the language, the annotation layer, and how much judgment each item needs. Narrow IPA transcription of tonal speech costs more per minute than dialect tagging of short text. We quote a fixed price per accepted item after a short scoping call, confirm it on a paid pilot batch, and hold it for the production order. Items that fail second review are never billed.
Which languages and dialects can you annotate?
Coverage is matched request by request. Each job is scoped by language, variety, and annotation layer, and we assign only linguists whose credentials and language background we have verified for that combination, including less-resourced languages where the annotator may also be documenting the variety. If we cannot staff a language to the standard the scheme demands, we say so during scoping, not after the pilot.
Where do the speech recordings come from?
From speakers who agreed to be recorded for this purpose, in sessions we run or through consented submissions. Consent and any release are attached to each recording before it enters a dataset, each file gets an acoustic fingerprint and a duplicate check on intake, and every label on it records who produced it and who confirmed it. Nothing is scraped.
What qualifications do linguists need to join, and how are they paid?
Most jobs expect graduate training in linguistics or a neighboring field plus demonstrated skill in the layer being annotated. Native or near-native fluency in a less-resourced language, combined with that training, qualifies you for specialist work. Every job lists its rate, scope, and deadline before you accept it, there is no quota, and approved batches are credited to your account with payouts after identity and tax verification.
Can we license a linguistic dataset exclusively?
Yes. Commissioned corpora and annotation layers can be licensed on an exclusive basis, with the scope, term, and exclusivity written into the agreement before work starts. Speech ships as WebDataset or Parquet, annotations as JSON Lines, CSV, or Parquet, each delivery with Croissant metadata and a signed receipt naming every item by identifier and hash.
Related expertise, solutions, and industries.
Tell us the language your model gets wrong.
Send the language, the layer, and the volume. A data lead replies inside one business day with a staffing view, a scheme outline, and a pilot price. Linguists: the application takes ten minutes. No deck. A ranked list.
Experienced within
Markets served.
As an enterprise AI agency, eeko systems delivers production AI systems remote-first across the United States and internationally — including these markets: