How to change the label of an Entity?

[robertoshimizu]

I've came across this example:

from spacy.tokens import Span

nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
doc = nlp("Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday on Twitter that\
           the company would make ventilators in case of a shortage\
           during the coronavirus pandemic. Now, New York City Mayor\
           Bill de Blasio is holding his feet to the fire.")

and it resulted in:

---

Tesla 0 5 CARDINAL
Elon Musk 10 19 PERSON
Wednesday 25 34 DATE
New York City 166 179 GPE
Bill de Blasio 196 210 PERSON

---

I tried to change the label for Tesla from CARDINAL to ORG. For this I tried: 1) create a new Span, however when adding to doc.ent, however it conflicts with the former one. I also tried to remove it but it seems that doc.ents is an object. Any suggestions on how do I make this change?

Which page or section is this issue related to?

https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#named-entities

[svlandeg]

You're right that you can't easily change the label_ of a Span because spans are views, and you can't easily change doc.ents because it's a tuple.

The easiest work-around is by converting the ents to a list, make the changes, and store them by setting doc.ents again.

ents = list(doc.ents)
old_ent = ents[0]
new_ent = Span(doc, old_ent.start, old_ent.end, label="ORG")
ents[0] = new_ent
doc.ents = ents