@inproceedings{lester-2020-iobes,
    title = "iobes: Library for Span Level Processing",
    author = "Lester, Brian",
    editor = "Park, Eunjeong L.  and
      Hagiwara, Masato  and
      Milajevs, Dmitrijs  and
      Liu, Nelson F.  and
      Chauhan, Geeticka  and
      Tan, Liling",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Second Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2020.nlposs-1.16/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.nlposs-1.16",
    pages = "115--119",
    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."
}