💫 This library is now integrated into spaCy v3.4 as debug data!

A simple tool to analyze the Spans in your dataset. It's tightly integrated with spaCy, so you can easily incorporate it to existing NLP pipelines. This is also a reproduction of Papay, et al's work on Dissecting Span Identification Tasks with Performance Prediction (EMNLP 2020).

Using pip:

pip install spacy-span-analyzer

Directly from source (I highly recommend running this within a virtual environment):

git clone git@github.com:ljvmiranda921/spacy-span-analyzer.git
cd spacy-span-analyzer
pip install .

You can use the Span Analyzer as a command-line tool:

spacy-span-analyzer ./path/to/dataset.spacy

Or as an imported library:

import spacy
from spacy.tokens import DocBin
from spacy_span_analyzer import SpanAnalyzer

nlp = spacy.blank("en")  # or any Language model

# Ensure that your dataset is a DocBin
doc_bin = DocBin().from_disk("./path/to/data.spacy")
docs = list(doc_bin.get_docs(nlp.vocab))

# Run SpanAnalyzer and get span characteristics
analyze = SpanAnalyzer(docs)
analyze.frequency  
analyze.length
analyze.span_distinctiveness
analyze.boundary_distinctiveness

Inputs are expected to be a list of spaCy Docs or a DocBin (if you're using the command-line tool).

In spaCy, you'd want to store your Spans in the doc.spans property, under a particular spans_key (sc by default). Unlike the doc.ents property, doc.spans allows overlapping entities. This is useful especially for downstream tasks like Span Categorization.

A common way to do this is to use char_span to define a slice from your Doc:

doc = nlp(text)
spans = []
from annotation in annotations:
    span = doc.char_span(
        annotation["start"],
        annotation["end"],
        annotation["label"],
    )
    spans.append(span)

# Put all spans under a spans_key
doc.spans["sc"] = spans

You can also achieve the same thing by using set_ents or by creating a SpanGroup.