Add custom entity in addition to NER basic model

Question

I am using spacy to train my own NER model. In addition to entities trained by spacy basic 'en_core_web_sm' model (ORG, PERSON, DATE, etc), I want to add my own entities. I trained my model with 'en_core_web_sm' as my base model, but then the model can only detect my own custom entities only, not the basic entities. Is there any way to do this? Thanks.

Answer 1

You can definitely do this with spaCy, cf the docs and also check Matt's blogpost around the problem of "catastrophic forgetting" (when your model "forgets" about the old types it knew before, which you obviously want to avoid).