selecting ner entity label after highlighting the text in annotation ui

Hi,
I am using ner manual recipie. During annotation, First I need to select the entity label and then highlight the text for the selected entity label. But Is it possible to reverse like:

First i will highlight the text span and then i will select the appropriate entity label for the highlighted text (I feel this way is more convinient because people need not search the text again if they highlight the text span at first).

This use case will be helpful for us because we are having long text length.

Thanks

Hi! At the moment, this is not easily possible, because we wanted to avoid having additional states for "selected" vs. "unselected" tokens. So you currently need to select the label first and then highlight the occurrences of that label.

(Btw, if your texts are really long, you might also want to consider splitting them into smaller chunks that are easier to work with? If you're training an NER model like spaCy's, there's not really an advantage in annotating the whole text at once. The model only pays attention to the local context anyways, so if the annotators can't make a decision based on the local context, the model is unlikely to learn the distinction.)