# NER and blank models

**URL:** <https://support.prodi.gy/t/ner-and-blank-models/1795>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Tags:** usage, ner, spacy, solved\
**Created:** [July 17, 2019, 1:17pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/ner-and-blank-models/1795 "2019-07-17T13:17:45Z")\
**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:** [July 17, 2019, 2:23pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/ner-and-blank-models/1795/4 "2019-07-17T14:23:20Z")

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Ah, yes – that looks like what I was referring to. The error message here isn't very nice, but I'm pretty sure it fails because the blank NER component isn't initialized.

> [@telemmaite](#):
>
> Ines, do you mean that I should create a custom recipe for that ?

No, I just meant in the code you use to create `blank_ner_en_core_web_lg` 🙂 Instead of calling `create_pipe` and `replace_pipe`, you just call `remove_pipe` and get rid of the old entity recognizer:

```python
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_lg")
nlp.remove_pipe("ner")
nlp.to_disk("en_core_web_lg_without_ner")

```

Prodigy should then add it and initialize it when you train. Alternatively, you can also use the code I posted above to initialize the blank NER component after you add it.

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_[View the full topic](https://support.prodi.gy/t/ner-and-blank-models/1795)._