Overlapping text highlighting

Is it possible to create overlapping annotations with the text highlighting annotation mode?

If you want to create overlapping spans, we recommend making several passes over the data. The manual NER / span highlighting mode is optimised for fast annotation, so making several passes with fewer labels is usually more efficient. Each annotation example has an input hash, which lets you reconcile annotations on the same text later on, so you’ll end up with one compact annotation containing all spans present in the text.

(Also, a quick note in case others come across this topic later on: There are various use cases for annotations that contain overlapping or nested labeled spans of text. However, those annotations won’t be suitable for general NER tasks, which only allow one exclusive entity label or non-entity label per token.)

Do you have any recommendations on:
an environment to explore labels freely, as overlapping highlights, where merging them into a cover/groups can be a post process?

Maybe a js package with overlapping text highlighting?