Automation tools promise to accelerate machine learning IDG Connect

Dreaming up obscure insults might be a good way to pass the time in a bar, but it's a strange day job. Nonetheless, it's a serious business if you are trying to train a machine to spot unacceptable online behaviour. Data scientists not only need to provide training data; they also need to describe which language is likely to offend within that data. The process, known as annotation, is just one of the laborious tasks data scientists face that IT firms are promising to make easier with automation. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM are offering a raft of technologies to automate machine learning processes (see box).