/**
* Returns true if the given two spans denote the same consistent NER chunk. That is, if we call
* {@link Util#extractNER(List, Span)} on these two spans, they would return the same span.
*
* @param tokens The tokens in the sentence.
* @param a The first span.
* @param b The second span.
* @param parse The parse tree to traverse looking for coreference chains to exploit.
* @return True if these two spans contain exactly the same NER.
*/
public static boolean nerOverlap(
List<CoreLabel> tokens, Span a, Span b, Optional<SemanticGraph> parse) {
Span nerA = extractNER(tokens, a);
Span nerB = extractNER(tokens, b);
return nerA.equals(nerB);
}
