Release Notes: v2.2.0 — Comprehensive Annotation & Export Platform

This release adds 9 new annotation schemas, intelligent annotation features (MACE, option highlighting, diversity ordering), a pluggable export system with 8 format backends, extended remote data source support, a standard survey instruments library, and major UX improvements including annotation navigation and form layout grids.

New Annotation Schemas

N-ary Event Annotation

  • Trigger-and-argument event annotation with hub-spoke arc visualization
  • Define event types with typed argument roles (e.g., Agent, Patient, Location)
  • Annotate triggers as spans, then attach argument spans to each trigger
  • Configurable event type taxonomy with per-type argument constraints
  • See Event Annotation Guide for details

Entity Linking

  • Link annotated spans to knowledge base entries (Wikidata, UMLS, or custom KBs)
  • Inline search widget with auto-complete and candidate ranking
  • Support for multiple KB backends with configurable endpoints
  • See Entity Linking Guide for configuration

Triage

  • Rapid accept/reject/skip annotation for high-throughput screening tasks
  • Single-click decisions with configurable keyboard shortcuts
  • Progress indicators and throughput metrics
  • See Triage Guide for setup

Pairwise Comparison

  • Compare two items side-by-side with binary A/B selection or scale slider modes
  • Configurable comparison dimensions and tie-breaking options
  • Balanced pair generation strategies
  • See Pairwise Annotation Guide for details

Conversation Tree Annotation

  • Hierarchical annotation of multi-turn conversations as tree structures
  • Branching dialogue support with parent-child turn relationships
  • Per-turn and per-branch annotation labels
  • See Conversation Tree Guide for details

Coreference Chain Annotation

  • Mark and chain coreferring mentions across a document
  • Color-coded chain visualization with merge and split operations
  • Cluster-level and mention-level annotation support
  • See Coreference Annotation Guide for details

Segmentation Mask Tools

  • Pixel-level fill and eraser tools for image segmentation
  • Mask PNG export for downstream model training
  • COCO RLE mask encoding for compact storage
  • Configurable brush sizes and label-based mask layers

Bounding Box for PDF/Documents

  • Draw bounding boxes on PDF pages and document images
  • Per-page annotation with multi-page navigation
  • Export in Pascal VOC and YOLO formats

Discontinuous/Multi-range Spans

  • Select non-contiguous text spans as a single annotation unit
  • Useful for capturing split antecedents and discontinuous entities

Intelligent Annotation

MACE Annotator Competence Estimation

  • Integration of Multi-Annotator Competence Estimation (MACE) for modeling annotator reliability
  • Per-annotator competence scores surfaced in admin dashboard
  • Weighted aggregation of annotations based on estimated competence
  • See MACE Guide for details

LLM-based Option Highlighting

  • AI-powered visual highlighting of likely correct options for discrete annotation tasks
  • Uses configurable LLM backend to pre-score label options
  • Subtle visual cues (not pre-selection) to guide annotators without biasing
  • See Option Highlighting Guide for configuration

Embedding-based Diversity Ordering

  • Reorder annotation queue to maximize diversity of consecutive items
  • Uses sentence embeddings to compute pairwise distances
  • Reduces annotator fatigue from repetitive content
  • See Diversity Ordering Guide for details

Video Object Tracking

  • Keyframe interpolation for tracking objects across video frames
  • Annotate objects in key frames and auto-interpolate bounding boxes between them

Infrastructure

Pluggable Export System

  • Unified export pipeline with 8 format backends:
  • COCO JSON (with RLE mask support)
  • YOLO darknet format
  • Pascal VOC XML
  • CoNLL-2003 and CoNLL-U for token-level annotations
  • Mask PNG for segmentation
  • EAF (ELAN) for audio/video time-aligned annotations
  • TextGrid (Praat) for phonetic segmentation
  • CLI export command: potato export <config> --format <fmt>
  • See Export Formats Guide for details

Extended Remote Data Sources

  • Load annotation data from remote locations:
  • HTTP/HTTPS URLs
  • Google Drive (public and authenticated)
  • Dropbox shared links
  • Amazon S3 buckets
  • HuggingFace datasets
  • Google Sheets
  • Database connections
  • Configurable caching and refresh policies
  • See Remote Data Sources Guide for setup

External AI Config File Support

  • Factor AI endpoint configuration into separate YAML files
  • Share AI configs across multiple annotation projects
  • Override AI parameters per-project while inheriting defaults

Format Handlers

  • Native rendering for PDF, Word (.docx), code files, and spreadsheets
  • In-browser previews with syntax highlighting for code
  • Page-level navigation for multi-page documents

Standard Survey Instruments Library

  • 55 validated questionnaires ready to deploy (SUS, NASA-TLX, UMUX, AttrakDiff, etc.)
  • Pre-configured scoring, reverse-coding, and normative benchmarks
  • Drop-in YAML includes for post-study surveys
  • See Survey Instruments Guide for the full catalog

UX Improvements

Annotation Navigation

  • Navigate between items with status badges showing annotation progress
  • Skip-to-unannotated button for efficient queue management
  • Filter items by annotation status (annotated, unannotated, skipped)
  • See Annotation Navigation Guide for details

Form Layout Grid

  • Arrange annotation schemas in multi-column grid layouts
  • CSS Grid-based positioning with configurable column spans
  • See Form Layout Guide for configuration

Resizable Instance Display

  • Draggable resize handles on instance display panels
  • Persist user-preferred panel sizes across sessions

Conditional Display Logic

  • Show or hide annotation fields based on prior responses
  • Branching annotation flows within a single instance
  • See Conditional Logic Guide for details

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed Peaks.js waveform rendering and overview/zoom synchronization
  • Fixed dependency arc persistence and span deletion issues
  • Fixed image annotation display and mask zoom synchronization
  • Fixed CSS visual issues: Likert alignment, whitespace, and textbox width
  • Fixed span annotation positioning for code and document displays
  • Fixed test infrastructure for login flow and obsolete JS functions

Documentation

  • 28+ new documentation pages added covering all new features
  • Project-hub examples reorganized with external AI config support
  • New guides: Event Annotation, Entity Linking, Triage, Pairwise Comparison, Coreference, Conversation Trees, Export Formats, Remote Data Sources, MACE, Option Highlighting, Diversity Ordering, Survey Instruments, Annotation Navigation, Form Layout, Conditional Logic, Tiered Annotation, Format Support, Layout Customization, Embedding Visualization, Annotation Filtering