Can SpanRuler do everything EntityRuler does?

[kinghuang]

I'm belatedly realizing that there's an annotate_ents config on SpanRuler that controls whether to save spans to doc.ents. With that enabled, is the SpanRuler as functionally capable as EntityRuler? Is there any reason to use an EntityRuler over a SpanRuler with annotate_ents=True?

I'm basically wondering if I can simplify my code and use SpanRuler exclusively for both creating span groups and adding to doc.ents.

[adrianeboyd]

SpanRuler can do everything that EntityRuler does. If you look at the factory for future_entity_ruler you can see how we have implemented the original EntityRuler functionality using SpanRuler:

spaCy/spacy/pipeline/span_ruler.py

Lines 22 to 63 in 86ee26e

	@Language.factory(
	"future_entity_ruler",
	assigns=["doc.ents"],
	default_config={
	"phrase_matcher_attr": None,
	"validate": False,
	"overwrite_ents": False,
	"scorer": {"@scorers": "spacy.entity_ruler_scorer.v1"},
	"ent_id_sep": "__unused__",
	},
	default_score_weights={
	"ents_f": 1.0,
	"ents_p": 0.0,
	"ents_r": 0.0,
	"ents_per_type": None,
	},
	)
	def make_entity_ruler(
	nlp: Language,
	name: str,
	phrase_matcher_attr: Optional[Union[int, str]],
	validate: bool,
	overwrite_ents: bool,
	scorer: Optional[Callable],
	ent_id_sep: str,
	):
	if overwrite_ents:
	ents_filter = prioritize_new_ents_filter
	else:
	ents_filter = prioritize_existing_ents_filter
	return SpanRuler(
	nlp,
	name,
	spans_key=None,
	spans_filter=None,
	annotate_ents=True,
	ents_filter=ents_filter,
	phrase_matcher_attr=phrase_matcher_attr,
	validate=validate,
	overwrite=False,
	scorer=scorer,
	)

The plan is to remove the current EntityRuler implementation in spacy v4 and just use SpanRuler underneath. future_entity_ruler will become entity_ruler so you can get the same behavior without changing your code, but we only have to maintain one component.

[kinghuang]

Awesome. The future_entity_ruler makes migration easy. Thanks!