title: How to prepare data for spacy's custom named entity recognition?
body: <p>I'm trying to prepare a training dataset for custom named entity recognition using spacy. My data has a variable 'Text', which contains some sentences, a variable 'Names', which has names of people from the previous variable (sentences). After going through some examples and spacy's documentation, I realised that one has to pass index of the entity while preparing the dataset. I want to know if there's any way to pass the entity as a string directly while preparing the dataset ?</p>
  
  <p>Reference: "<a href="https://medium.com/@manivannan_data/how-to-train-ner-with-custom-training-data-using-spacy-188e0e508c6" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://medium.com/@manivannan_data/how-to-train-ner-with-custom-training-data-using-spacy-188e0e508c6</a>"</p>