# Editing rel.manual to allow for multiple passes to account for nested entities

**URL:** <https://support.prodi.gy/t/editing-rel-manual-to-allow-for-multiple-passes-to-account-for-nested-entities/6118>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Tags:** usage\
**Created:** [November 15, 2022, 7:20am UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/editing-rel-manual-to-allow-for-multiple-passes-to-account-for-nested-entities/6118 "2022-11-15T07:20:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ryanwesslen](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/ryanwesslen/32/2969_2.png) [@ryanwesslen](https://support.prodi.gy/u/ryanwesslen)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2022, 4:46pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/editing-rel-manual-to-allow-for-multiple-passes-to-account-for-nested-entities/6118/2 "2022-11-16T16:46:50Z")

</div>

hi @rgandhasri87!

Thanks for your post and welcome to the Prodigy community 👋

> [@rgandhasri87](#):
>
> My question is, how would I do this?

Did you also see this post?

> [@Nested Labels while using rel.manual](https://support.prodi.gy/t/nested-labels-while-using-rel-manual/3597/2):
>
> Hi! Prodigy's interfaces for NER (and the span annotation features within the relations UI) are set up to work best with the way named entity recognition models generally work: contiguous, non-overlapping spans, with clear beginnings and endings. If the relation annotation has to represent any number of nested spans with each span and token being potentially connected to each other, this easily gets very messy and inefficient, and there's usually a better way to structure the task that's both e…

It's a more recent post that provides some background on approaching this problem.

Alternatively, are you aware of [spancat](https://prodi.gy/docs/span-categorization#ner-vs-spancat)? It was designed (in part) to handle nested/overlapping entities as `NER` cannot.

This post provides some background on ways to combine `spancat` with relations:

> [@Can Dependencies & Relations work after Span Categorization?](https://support.prodi.gy/t/can-dependencies-relations-work-after-span-categorization/4830/2):
>
> Hi! Interesting use-case slight_smile I think your suggested approach of using a spancat to extract the "rights" makes sense, as this is indeed not a typical NER task. What isn't clear to me is how you're defining the actions like "contact us" or "access your account settings". Are these extracted with a spancat model as well? With respect to relation extraction: There is builtin support in Prodigy to annotate both entities and relations at the same time with [rel.manual](https://prodi.gy/docs/dependencies-relations#ner). This does assume th…

Hope this helps provide more direction and let us know if you have further questions!

---

_[View the full topic](https://support.prodi.gy/t/editing-rel-manual-to-allow-for-multiple-passes-to-account-for-nested-entities/6118)._