How are custom labels created?

Custom labels are the perfect solution to creating a coding system specifically for your needs.

A custom label must have a designated synonym set, which is the basis of deciding whether a verbatim will be a hit or not. The synonyms are not case-sensitive, and accented synonyms also trigger a hit if their non-accented counterparts are present in a text. Just like in the cases of automatic labeling or entity recognition, a custom label is recognized in a verbatim only if any of its synonyms can be found in the text by matching the beginning of a phrase.

Exact match is also possible, but it must be indicated individually for every synonym in question. You can also define an AND relation between two or more synonyms by using the AND operator – in this case a verbatim will be a hit only if all the synonyms affected by the operator can be found in the same clause. You can further finetune the custom label with excluded phrases. Excluded phrases are not a must, but they can come in handy from time to time. They work similarly to synonyms, but if they have a match in a verbatim, it means that verbatim cannot be a hit for that custom label.


Usually, custom labels apply to only one language, but it is also possible to create multilingual custom labels. In this case, you will need to create a separate synonym set (and excluded phrase set if needed) for each language you want to use.


You can group your custom labels into categories to create a meaningful structure, and you can also use tags on them to distinguish between your projects.


This setup can be done interactively on the Zurvey.io platform, or you can create an Excel file and upload it to the platform. In the Excel file, each row represents a separate custom label and the columns represent the following: name, category, tag, synonyms and excludes. If your custom labels are multilingual, more columns are needed for synonyms and excluded phrases in each language.