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  • Details & Setup
  • Tasks, Actions & Agents
  • Assets & Files

API Reference

  • Command-Line Interface
  • Recipe Development
  • Recipes API

Recipes

Recipes are functions that define workflows for annotation, model training, data analysis, automated agents and more. Ellf comes with a range of built-in workflows for different use cases and also lets you implement your own custom recipes that run on your cluster. Recipes that are not pre-installed by default can be added with ellf publish code.

Use Ellf to configure recipes for you

If you’ve connected Ellf to your coding assistant, it will be able to create and start tasks, actions, agents and services for you. It can also help you develop fully custom recipes for your use case.

Tasks Annotation and review

Tasks are workflows that preprocess and queue up data for annotation or review and start the annotation server. You can view and create them in the UI via Tasks or using the CLI commands under ellf tasks. To build your own, see the task recipe guide and API.

Tasks/Text10

Coreference Resolution

Annotate coreference, i.e. links of ambiguous mentions like "her" or "the woman" back to an antecedent providing more context about the entity in question.

Dependency Parsing

Annotate syntactic dependencies between words, starting from a trained spaCy model's predictions.

Hello World

Accept or reject a label on a stream of generated examples.

Named Entity Recognition

Annotate named entities (NER) like people, organizations, places or products, manually or with suggestions from a spaCy model or match patterns.

Part-of-Speech Tagging

Annotate part-of-speech (POS) tags like verbs or nouns, starting from a trained spaCy model's tagger.

Relation Extraction

Annotate relations between entities, spans or tokens. Also supports joint span and relation annotation.

Sentence Segmentation

Correct a spaCy model's sentence boundaries to create gold data for sentence segmentation.

Span Categorization

Annotate overlapping and nested text spans (spancat), manually or with suggestions from a spaCy model or match patterns.

Terminology List

Bootstrap a terminology list (gazetteer) from spaCy word vectors. Terminology lists can be converted into match patterns to pre-select entity spans during annotation.

Text Classification

Assign categories to whole texts or sentences, e.g. topic, sentiment or intent. Single- or multi-label, optionally with suggestions from a spaCy model.

Tasks/Data & Review3

Data Curation & Exploration

Browse an input asset or dataset and accept or reject examples, e.g. to filter data or check annotations before training.

Debug Task

Task with tunable delays and errors for debugging.

Annotation Review

Review annotations from multiple annotators, resolve conflicts and disagreements, and save one final gold-standard annotation per example.

Tasks/PDF3

PDF Image Annotation

Annotate bounding boxes and segments on PDF pages rendered as images, e.g. tables, figures or signatures.

PDF OCR Correction

Run Tesseract OCR on the bounding boxes annotated with PDF Image Annotation and correct the extracted text.

PDF Span Annotation

Annotate text spans, e.g. named entities, in PDFs pre-processed into a Layout asset by the Extract PDF layout action.

Tasks/Image1

Image Annotation

Draw bounding boxes, polygons or freehand segments on images (object detection, segmentation), or classify images into categories.

Tasks/Audio & Video2

Audio Annotation

Label regions in audio files (e.g. speakers or sound events), classify recordings into categories, or transcribe them.

Video Annotation

Label regions in video files, classify videos into categories, or transcribe them.


Actions Training, evaluation and processing

Actions are workflows that execute any logic and exit, similar to jobs running in a CI system. You can view and create them in the UI via Actions or using the CLI commands under ellf actions. To build your own, see the action recipe guide and API.

Actions/Training5

Push a model to Hugging Face

Publish a trained spaCy pipeline or fine-tuned Hugging Face model to a model repo, private by default.

Fine-tune a Hugging Face model

Fine-tune a Hugging Face transformers model for NER or text classification on your annotations (CPU). The result can run as an annotation agent or be pushed to the Hub.

Fine-tune a Hugging Face model (GPU)

Fine-tune a Hugging Face transformers model for NER or text classification on your annotations on a GPU worker, for models too large to train on CPU.

Train a spaCy pipeline

Train a spaCy pipeline on your annotations: named entities, spans, text classification, tagging, parsing, sentence segmentation or coreference.

Train a spaCy pipeline with a curated transformer (GPU)

Train a spaCy pipeline using spacy-curated-transformers for GPU-accelerated training and inference, loading BERT, RoBERTa, CamemBERT or XLM-RoBERTa weights from a Hugging Face checkpoint.

Actions/Data10

Apply a spacy-curated-transformers model (GPU)

Run inference with a trained spacy-curated-transformers model over an input dataset or asset, writing predictions to an output dataset.

Copy or merge datasets

Copy or merge annotated data into a new dataset.

Download spaCy models

Download and install one or more spaCy models to shared storage so they can be loaded with spacy.load().

Import a Hugging Face dataset

Download a dataset split from the Hugging Face Hub and save it as an Input asset, ready to annotate.

Push a dataset to Hugging Face

Publish an annotated dataset to a Hugging Face dataset repo, private by default.

Download a Hugging Face model

Download a model checkpoint from the Hugging Face Hub into the cluster's shared cache, so agents and training start without downloading it again.

Classify text with an LLM

Get text classification predictions from an OpenAI model, set up in a spacy-llm config, and save them to a dataset.

Migrate dataset to structured format

Convert a dataset's examples from before structured storage to the structured format. The originals are backed up as a JSONL asset on your cluster first, then removed from the dataset.

Generate synthetic data with Gemini Flash

Generate diverse synthetic examples from a plain-English task description using Google Gemini Flash, write them as a JSONL file and register the result as an Input asset on the cluster.

Classify text with Jev

Label texts with TypeSafe's Jev and keep the answers it's confident about. Exclude the output dataset from a text classification task to leave the rest to people.

Actions/PDF2

Ingest PDFs

Render a published PDF asset's pages into images with pypdfium2, making it ready to annotate. Run via ellf publish data --kind pdf --render, or directly against an already-published asset.

Extract PDF layout

Extract text and layout from a PDF asset with spacy-layout and Docling, and save as a Layout asset for fast annotation with PDF Span Annotation.

Actions/Other2

Create an example asset

Write a small text file to the given path and register it as an Input asset, to try out actions and assets on a cluster.

Hello world

Print 'hello world'.


Agents Auto-annotation and automation

Agents are autonomous workers and annotators that can be assigned to tasks. They’re typically powered by LLMs and can use models running on the cluster or via APIs. You can view and create them in the UI via Agents or using the CLI commands under ellf agents. To build your own, see the agent recipe guide and API.

Agents/APIs3

Gemini Annotation Agent

Annotation agent powered by Google Gemini. Annotates named entities (NER), spans, part-of-speech tags and text categories, and accepts or rejects binary suggestions.

Hugging Face LLM Agent

Annotation agent powered by an LLM on Hugging Face Inference Providers, e.g. Llama. Annotates named entities (NER), spans, part-of-speech tags and text categories, and accepts or rejects binary suggestions.

Hugging Face Model Agent

Annotation agent running a fine-tuned Hugging Face transformers model on your cluster. Annotates named entities (NER) and spans with a token-classification model, or text categories with a text-classification model.

Agents/Other2

Hello World

Accept every task it is given.

spaCy Test Agent

Deterministic annotation agent for tests and development. Annotates named entities and spans in manual NER and span categorization tasks, using spaCy match patterns.


Services Apps and APIs

Services are long-running background processes like REST or MCP APIs and web apps that are served from your cluster, with authentication handled automatically by the platform. They’re a good fit for MCP servers your coding assistant connects to, dashboards and demos, or HTTP integrations used by other tasks, actions and agents. You can view and create them in the UI via Services or using the CLI commands under ellf services. To build your own, see the service recipe guide and API.

Services/Dashboard2

Annotation Dashboard

Live Streamlit dashboard for an annotation dataset: label distribution, conflicting annotations, a browsable table of every annotation, and health checks. Opens in the browser for logged-in project members.

marimo Notebook

Install

Run editable marimo notebooks on your cluster, with access to the Prodigy database and authentication handled by Ellf. Opens in the browser for logged-in project members.

Services/MCP1

Pattern Generation MCP Server

spaCy NER pattern generation as an MCP server. Uses Google Gemini to propose and iteratively refine spaCy matcher patterns given example text and a description of the entity types.

Services/Other1

Hello World

Serve a 'hello world' HTTP endpoint.


Community Recipes Third-party and other plugins

These recipes can be installed to your cluster separately and are provided by packages from the developer community. If you want to contribute a recipe you’ve built, get in touch! For more details on custom recipes, see the recipe development guide.

Coming soon: This section is still under construction.

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