Overlapping entities

[Zim1-finest]

I have a basic beginner question: Is it possible to have overlapping entities on one spaCy model?

For example if I create a new entity class called food and train spaCy to extract food items can I also then create another entity named Pasta where I train the model to extract only pasta entities or will I need a new model to train the overlapping entities?

FYI, I am using food here only as an example. In the real case I want to use locations and I am thinking whether to add the new location lables to the pretrained model or start with an empty spaCy model.

[polm]

You can't do this with an NER model because each token can only have one NER label. You can do this with spancat.

You can also train multiple models and have one overwrite the other, see the double NER project.

[Zim1-finest]

I just went through the spancat and the double NER. It seems like that is exactly what I needed.

Thank you...