Industries
Terminology, register and edge cases differ sharply by sector. This page sets out what the data usually looks like in nine industries, what tends to go wrong in each, and the tasks we are most often asked for.
The lexicon is built with your team before production. Sector knowledge is what makes that first draft a starting point rather than an empty page.
For most sectors, industry expertise means terminology and document conventions: knowing that 与信 is credit assessment rather than lending, that a Japanese invoice separates tax-inclusive and tax-exclusive totals, that a support ticket escalation is signalled by a shift in politeness level rather than by an angry word.
That kind of knowledge can be transferred to a trained annotator with a good lexicon and a few days of calibration, and for the majority of projects that is the right approach — it is faster, cheaper and produces more consistent data than assembling specialists for work that does not need them.
Some judgments are different in kind. Whether a contract clause is enforceable, whether a tax treatment is correct, whether an AI answer about social insurance would mislead a reader — these are professional judgments, and no lexicon substitutes for the training behind them. Knowing which of your tasks fall into which category is most of the value of this conversation.
At a glance
By sector
Each entry lists the data we usually see, the recurring pitfall, and the tasks most often requested.
Product documentation, filings, disclosures, customer communications and compliance text, in a register that is formal even by Japanese business standards.
The recurring pitfall Numeric formats vary within a single document — Arabic and kanji numerals, 億 and 万 units, era dates and Gregorian dates side by side. Uncontrolled, extracted figures become unreliable.
Typical tasks
Contracts, terms, internal policies, court and registry documents, written in a highly conventionalised style with fixed clause structures.
The recurring pitfall Clause boundaries and defined terms carry legal weight. An entity span that includes or excludes a qualifier changes what the annotation asserts, and ordinary fluency does not reveal that.
Typical tasks
Clinical notes, patient-facing material, pharmaceutical documentation and research text, dense with abbreviations and Latin- and English-derived terms.
The recurring pitfall Abbreviations are ambiguous and context-dependent, and the same term appears in kanji, katakana and Latin script. Personal information handling constrains how the work can be staffed at all.
Typical tasks
Product titles and attributes, catalogue text, search queries, reviews and customer questions — high volume, low formality, heavily abbreviated.
The recurring pitfall Product names mix scripts freely and are written differently by sellers, by search users and in the catalogue. Matching across those three surfaces is the actual task hiding behind most retail annotation requests.
Typical tasks
Tickets, chat logs, call transcripts and knowledge base content, where politeness level is itself a signal about the state of the conversation.
The recurring pitfall Escalation in Japanese is often marked by a shift into more formal language rather than by explicit complaint. Sentiment models trained on lexical cues miss it entirely.
Typical tasks
Inspection reports, maintenance logs, technical manuals, safety documentation and shop-floor records, often handwritten or scanned.
The recurring pitfall Site-specific abbreviations and in-house terminology dominate, and rarely appear in any dictionary. The lexicon has to be built from your documents rather than from the industry.
Typical tasks
Itineraries, property and facility descriptions, reviews, place names and multilingual guest communications.
The recurring pitfall Japanese place and facility names have multiple valid readings, and the same location appears under several official and colloquial names. Reading errors propagate into search and speech products.
Typical tasks
Documentation, release notes, support content, developer discussion and UI text, mixing Japanese with English technical vocabulary throughout.
The recurring pitfall Loanwords appear in katakana, in English, and in both within one sentence, with inconsistent long-vowel spelling. Tokenizers split these unpredictably, which destabilises span annotation.
Typical tasks
Application forms, notices, statutory text and procedural guidance, following long-standing administrative conventions.
The recurring pitfall Era-based dates, older kanji forms in names and registries, and fixed administrative phrasings that must be preserved exactly rather than paraphrased.
Typical tasks
Expertise
The distinction is not how technical the vocabulary is. It is whether the judgment being made is a professional one.
Where specialists are required, we build the team around the expertise the project needs. We do not maintain a standing roster of licensed professionals, availability is assessed per project against its scope, volume and timeline, and if a qualification cannot be sourced for your project we will tell you before it starts.
FAQ
What teams ask when their sector is or is not on the list above.
No. The list reflects the data types we see most often, not a boundary. What determines fit is whether the judgment your task requires is linguistic, terminological or professional — send a sample and we will tell you which it is, and whether we are the right people for it.
From your documents first, then from public sources, then from a specialist where one is warranted. The lexicon is drafted before the pilot, tested during it, and versioned alongside the guideline. In-house terminology that appears nowhere else is exactly the part we expect to get from you rather than to know already.
Usually yes, and it is often better — a single team carrying one guideline produces more consistent data than several teams producing their own. Where business units have genuinely different registers or confidentiality boundaries, we separate them deliberately and say why.
Industries
A representative sample tells us more about the sector-specific difficulty than a description does. We come back with a draft lexicon and a view on whether specialists are needed.
NDA before you share any data. Pilot scoping is free.