Handling Nested Entities

[jpcorb20]

Hello,

First, thanks for the great lib!

I was wondering if you could confirm if the metrics can handle well the nested entities as well as flat ones (i.e. entity spans inside one or many other entity spans) ? In the examples, we only see flat entities. My guess is that the strict metric should hold for both cases.

Thanks in advance

[ivyleavedtoadflax]

Hi @jpcorb20 thanks for raising an issue. Could you provide a quick example?

[jpcorb20]

Hello @ivyleavedtoadflax,

thanks for the quick reply!

So, an example of nested entities would be:

Joe Smith, president of the United States, went to Toronto, Canada, in February 2009.
(18 tokens with punctuations, white space delimited)

( ( Joe )FIRSTNAME ( Smith )LASTNAME )PERSON, president of the ( ( United States )COUNTRY )LOCATION, went to ( ( Toronto )CITY, ( Canada )COUNTRY )LOCATION, in ( ( February )MONTH ( 2009 )YEAR )DATE.

List of entities that would be refence :

entity_reference_list=[
{"label": "PERSON", "start": 0 , "end": 1},
{"label": "FIRSTNAME", "start": 0 , "end": 0},
{"label": "LASTNAME", "start": 1 , "end": 1},
{"label": "LOCATION", "start": 6 , "end": 7},
{"label": "COUNTRY", "start": 6 , "end": 7},
{"label": "LOCATION", "start": 10 , "end": 11},
{"label": "CITY", "start": 10 , "end": 10},
{"label": "COUNTRY", "start": 11 , "end": 11},
{"label": "DATE", "start": 16 , "end": 17},
{"label": "MONTH", "start": 16 , "end": 16},
{"label": "YEAR", "start": 17 , "end": 17}
]

As you can see in this example, you can have many entities on the same span as well as sub-spans nested inside larger ones.

[ivyleavedtoadflax]

Thanks @jpcorb20 for clarifying. So this isn't a use case we have tried before with the package. I'd really want to write some tests to confirm that it works as expected. We're not actively developing the package at the moment though, so I can't give you a timeline for when that might be. If you want to put in a PR yourself with some new tests, we can help you test and merge it.