code: def _remove_char_at_start(phrase):
      chars = [
          "@",
          "-",
          "=",
          ".",
          ":",
          "+",
          "?",
          "nt",
          '"',
          "'",
          "'S",
          "'s",
          ",",
      ]
      if phrase and len(phrase) > 0:
          while len(phrase) > 0 and phrase[0].text in chars:
              phrase = phrase[1:]
      return phrase
  
imports: import pickle
  from os import path
  import numpy
  import spacy
  from spacy.tokens import Doc
  from spacy.tokens import Span
  from nlp_architect.models.chunker import SequenceChunker
  from nlp_architect.utils.generic import pad_sentences
  from nlp_architect.utils.io import validate_existing_filepath
  from nlp_architect.utils.text import extract_nps, Stopwords
label_desc: Use image node_id 8 for calling a global function with example usage: _remove_char_at_start(phrase) and returns: phrase