allow displacy to display several kind of spans

[joseberlines]

I would like to display several categories of spans
going to the documentation I can see:
https://spacy.io/usage/visualizers#span

import spacy
from spacy import displacy
from spacy.tokens import Span

text = "Welcome to the Bank of China. We are at home."

nlp = spacy.blank("en")
doc = nlp(text)

doc.spans["sc"] = [
    Span(doc, 3, 6, "ORG"), 
    Span(doc, 5, 6, "GPE"),
]

# adding other custom spans
doc.spans["custom"] = [Span(doc, 9, 10, "home")]
options = {"spans_key": "custom"}
displacy.serve(doc, style="span", options=options)

with
options = {"spans_key": ["custom","sc"]}
it does not work.

It looks like it is only possible to visualize ONE category of spans.

is that so? if not this is a suggestion for a change. (I would not call it improvement because there might be a reason for this way of working)

[ljvmiranda921]

Hi @joseberlines ,

Yes, the visualizer can only display one spans_key at a time. It might be tricky to distinguish between two keys in the visualization, hence the design. If you like to show both, you can combine them into a single spans_key (e.g., custom_sc) and pass that value to displaCy.

[joseberlines]

Cool. Indeed when visualizing I assume there won't be needed to visualize a million spans. So combining all might be an idea.

[gonconist]

Hi,

What about the case where we want to visualize both gold and predicted spans in the same plot using different colors? The gold span can match the predicted one, but nevertheless, I'd like to use a different color to make the distinction.

Any suggestions?