Playing with
Spacy and it’s as nice and I thought it’d be.

Interesting bits and general dump of first impressions:

• NER @ CLI: Custom-named entity recognition with spaCy in four lines: spacy can:
  • Convert NER datasets from conll
  • while outputting nice status info
• Has a “Debug data” tool that allows to validate train data (and other stuff): Command Line Interface · spaCy API Documentation
• Can do rule-based matching, linguistic features, Rule-based matching · spaCy Usage Documentation
• Some support for Transformers, including allegedly all HuggingFace ones!
• Both Doc and Span are heavily token-based, including for NER stuff. Can’t set a sub-token entity, for example.
• But Doc.char_span() supports creating a Span based on characters and various alignment methods! Doc · spaCy API Documentation
  • And of course we can get the character offsets from the span itself
• You can merge/split tokens: Linguistic Features · spaCy Usage Documentation
• The Example class for individual training instances can do neat stuff with BIO mapping, aligning of NER tokens etc: Example · spaCy API Documentation