# Will NER improve Text Categorization?

**URL:** <https://support.prodi.gy/t/will-ner-improve-text-categorization/5585>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [April 28, 2022, 2:31pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/will-ner-improve-text-categorization/5585 "2022-04-28T14:31:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![valentijnnieman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/valentijnnieman/32/2927_2.png) [@valentijnnieman](https://support.prodi.gy/u/valentijnnieman)\
**Post date:** [April 28, 2022, 2:31pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/will-ner-improve-text-categorization/5585/1 "2022-04-28T14:31:15Z")

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Hello!

There's a question I have that's maybe more regarding NLP in general than Prodigy or SpaCy. I thought I'd try here since it seems you folks are so responsive and helpful - but please let me know if this isn't the right place to ask.

I was wondering - if I'm doing text categorization with SpaCy, using textcat-multi for example, will those results improve if an NER component was before it in the pipeline? My thinking about that is: if a sentence like "Senior Javascript Developer" would be categorized as, say, "A" (or any other category), and if then `Javascript` would be tagged as a "Programming Language" entity or similar, would the textcat pick that up, and use that to say, for example, a sentence like "Python Engineer", is similar because of that entity? Assuming `Python` is also a "Programming Language" entity of course.

My understanding of it is that the textcat component will take the `tok2vec` vectors and look for similarity there, but will the vectors be similar in one or more dimensions if the found entity using NER is similar? Am I thinking about this the right way? If it's at all possible, how would that work with SpaCy and/or Prodigy?

Thanks a bunch in advance, and do let me know if this isn't the right space to ask these questions!

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**Author:** ![koaning](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/koaning/32/230_2.png) [@koaning](https://support.prodi.gy/u/koaning)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2022, 8:12am UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/will-ner-improve-text-categorization/5585/2 "2022-04-29T08:12:57Z")

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Hi Valentijn,

spaCy questions are better asked on our GitHub Discussions board. The spaCy contributors also keep an eye on that forum, which is why I recommend going there.

In fact, your question seems partially answered [there](https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/discussions/10137).

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**Author:** ![pavelklymenko](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/pavelklymenko/32/3116_2.png) [@pavelklymenko](https://support.prodi.gy/u/pavelklymenko)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2022, 7:41pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/will-ner-improve-text-categorization/5585/3 "2022-07-18T19:41:52Z")

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@valentijnnieman , just curious if you were able to obtain answers to your questions?

Likely, I’ll have same/ similar question in the nearest future.

@koaning thanks for pointing out the topic on GitHub. It’s a bit hard for me to completely understand the answer at this point. Need to do more homework as I’m just starting to dig into the topic.

Thank you.