Odia Document Annotation Specialist

Obsidian; New York (NY); On-site; USD 35,000 - 52,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor seeks an exacting Odiya data annotator to capture full-page structure and transcription for a diverse set of documents.

You will identify regions, bound them, transcribe in Odiya script, and ensure accurate reading order across complex layouts, including handwritten or multi-column pages. This role emphasizes precision and rigorous review, contributing to high-quality training data.

Qualifications

• Native Odiya speaker with full command of the script and orthography.
• Extensive experience in document annotation and transcription workflows.
• Character-level accuracy is essential for this role.
• Systematic and consistent application of taxonomy across many pages.

Responsibilities

• Source publicly accessible Odiya PDFs with multimodal content and note provenance.
• Annotate page structure by bounding regions and assigning types/read-order indices.
• Record relationships between regions and their parent figures/tables.
• Transcribe all text exactly in Odiya script, flagging illegible regions.
• Capture page metadata and prepare review-ready outputs; support peer review.

Skills

Odiya language

Annotation experience

Transcription

Localization

Proofreading

Attention to detail

Job description

Fluent Language Skills Required:

Odiya. Native fluency in Odiya (Oriya), including full command of Odiya script and orthography, is required for this position. All annotation and transcription work is performed in Odiya.

Why This Role Exists

Document understanding breaks down fastest in the languages that parsing and vision-language models rarely see. This project builds training data for exactly those languages: Odiya, alongside four other Indic scripts, Japanese and Korean. Each task takes a real, publicly available PDF page and produces a complete structural map of that page, paired with a faithful transcription of every text region in the original script.

The dataset deliberately concentrates on the material models handle worst: handwriting, dense multi-column layouts, tables, diagrams, and mixed-script pages. Documents are drawn from newspapers, textbooks, examinations, and everyday formats such as flyers, forms, manuals, menus, brochures, notices and worksheets, so that the corpus reflects the real diversity of Odiya documents rather than a narrow band of easily parsed ones.

Delivered work is human-authored throughout. Component identification, component typing, reading order and all transcription are performed by people, not generated by parsing models.

What You'll Do

• Source documents: find a publicly accessible Odiya PDF in an assigned document type, containing at least one multimodal element (images, tables, diagrams, or handwriting), and record where you obtained it
• Annotate structure: identify and bound every meaningful region of the page - document title, section heading, paragraph, list, table, figure, diagram, caption, formula, question, answer field - and assign each a component type and a reading-order index
• Record relationships: link each region to the figure or table it belongs to through a parent component identifier
• Transcribe faithfully: reproduce all text exactly as it appears in Odiya script, including handwritten content, flagging any region where the source is not legible
• Capture page metadata: language, document type, source, page dimensions, and flags for tables, formulas and handwriting
• Review a colleague's work: every task is reviewed end to end by a second Odiya expert, and experienced annotators take on that review

Who You Are

• You are a native Odiya speaker with full command of the script, its diacritics and its conjunct forms
• You have worked with documents: annotation, transcription, translation, localization, subtitling, proofreading, journalism, or regional-language data review
• You are exact: character-level accuracy matters more here than speed, and a single wrong diacritic is a defect
• You are systematic: you apply a taxonomy consistently across hundreds of pages rather than improvising per document
• You are comfortable with unfamiliar layouts: multi-column newspapers, exam papers, handwritten forms

Nice-to-Have Specialties

• Regional-language AI data: annotation, labeling, grading, or bilingual evaluation for training datasets
• Transcription and localization: MTPE, subtitling, bilingual QA, OCR correction or post-editing
• Document production: typesetting, copy-editing, proofreading, or digitization of Odiya-language material
• Script and encoding: Unicode normalization, Odiya input methods, numeral-form and character-form accuracy

What Success Looks Like

• Every meaningful region on the page is captured, correctly bounded and correctly typed
• Reading order reflects how the page is actually read, including across columns
• Transcriptions match the source character for character, in Odiya script rather than transliteration
• Your tasks pass second-expert review the first time
• The documents you bring in add layout diversity rather than repeating templates already in the corpus

Why Join Mercor

• Build the training data that makes document AI work in scripts it currently handles badly
• Work from real published Odiya documents rather than synthetic or templated pages
• Quality leads on this project: accuracy is the first measure, with handling time tracked alongside it