iobes: Library for Span Level Processing

Brian Lester


Abstract
Many tasks in natural language processing, such as named entity recognition and slot-filling, involve identifying and labeling specific spans of text. In order to leverage common models, these tasks are often recast as sequence labeling tasks. Each token is given a label and these labels are prefixed with special tokens such as B- or I-. After a model assigns labels to each token, these prefixes are used to group the tokens into spans. Properly parsing these annotations is critical for producing fair and comparable metrics; however, despite its importance, there is not an easy-to-use, standardized, programmatically integratable library to help work with span labeling. To remedy this, we introduce our open-source library, iobes. iobes is used for parsing, converting, and processing spans represented as token level decisions.
Anthology ID:
2020.nlposs-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of Second Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Eunjeong L. Park, Masato Hagiwara, Dmitrijs Milajevs, Nelson F. Liu, Geeticka Chauhan, Liling Tan
Venue:
NLPOSS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
115–119
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlposs-1.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.nlposs-1.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Brian Lester. 2020. iobes: Library for Span Level Processing. In Proceedings of Second Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS), pages 115–119, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
iobes: Library for Span Level Processing (Lester, NLPOSS 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2020.nlposs-1.16.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939748
Code
 blester125/iobes