A light-weight library for creating span level annotations from token level decisions.
Details and an explaination on why you should use this library can be found in the paper at the Second workshop on Open Source NLP
If you use this library in your research I would appreciate if you would cite the following:
@inproceedings{lester-2020-iobes,
title = "iobes: Library for Span Level Processing",
author = "Lester, Brian",
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://www.aclweb.org/anthology/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.",
}