# Custom recipe for Annotating Overlapping Spans

**URL:** https://support.prodi.gy/t/custom-recipe-for-annotating-overlapping-spans/2269
**Category:** Uncategorized
**Tags:** front-end, best-practices, custom
**Created:** [November 29, 2019, 8:04pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/custom-recipe-for-annotating-overlapping-spans/2269 "2019-11-29T20:04:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 4

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### Author: ![ines](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/ines/32/3_2.png) [@ines](https://support.prodi.gy/u/ines)
#### Post date: [February 4, 2020, 10:31am UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/custom-recipe-for-annotating-overlapping-spans/2269/4 "2020-02-04T10:31:06Z")

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> [@bart\_factual\_design](#):
>
> From your answer I understand that the Spacy model can be trained using overlapping entities. Is that correct?

No, the model predicts **one label per token** , so it can't be trained on overlapping entities. This is true for most named entity recognition model implementations, since classic "named entities" can't overlap by definition.

> [@bart\_factual\_design](#):
>
> And another question: does the Spacy model compare individual token (or span) accuracy and pick the highest value? If so, is it possible to output all entity predictions per token?

This is a bit more complex – see here for details and an explanation:

> [@Accessing probabilities in NER](https://support.prodi.gy/t/accessing-probabilities-in-ner/94/2):
>
> Hi, The answer to this question is a little bit involved. The short answer is this: # Number of alternate analyses to consider. More is slower, and not necessarily better -- you need to experiment on your problem. beam\_width = 16 # This clips solutions at each step. We multiply the score of the top-ranked action by this value, and use the result as a threshold. This prevents the parser from exploring options that look very unlikely, saving a bit of efficiency. Accuracy may also improve, becau…

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