Should we pass sentences that contain no entities when training NER model?

[erotavlas]

Is it ok to pass sentences that contain no entities when training the NER model? Will spacy even accept these sentences and learn from them, or will it discard them?

[ines]

Yes, absolutely – in fact, it's super important. The model shouldn't only be seeing texts that have entities, but also texts that have no entities (i.e. an empty list). Otherwise, it may struggle to deal with those inputs at runtime.