# What is format for marking up possessives on entities (Tom's)

**URL:** <https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533>\
**Category:** Rasa Open Source\
**Created:** [October 9, 2019, 11:11pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533 "2019-10-09T23:11:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mmm3bbb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@mmm3bbb](https://forum.rasa.com/u/mmm3bbb)\
**Post date:** [October 9, 2019, 11:11pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533/1 "2019-10-09T23:11:04Z")

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If I want to recognize Tom as a person entity, is it this:

`- It is [Tom](person)'s`

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**Author:** ![Tanja](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.rasa.com/tanja/32/4696_2.png) [@Tanja](https://forum.rasa.com/u/Tanja)\
**Post date:** [October 10, 2019, 8:22am UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533/2 "2019-10-10T08:22:42Z")

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That should work. Both tokenizers (`WhitespaceTokenizer` `SpacyTokenizer`) will split the text into `"It" "is" "Tom" "s"`.

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**Author:** ![mmm3bbb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@mmm3bbb](https://forum.rasa.com/u/mmm3bbb)\
**Post date:** [October 10, 2019, 3:30pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533/3 "2019-10-10T15:30:28Z")

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Thx @Tanja.

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**Author:** ![mmm3bbb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@mmm3bbb](https://forum.rasa.com/u/mmm3bbb)\
**Post date:** [October 13, 2019, 6:16pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533/4 "2019-10-13T18:16:38Z")

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Hi @Tanja, can you confirm the WhitespaceTokenizer would break on the single quote?

Here it says it won’t (the big “Warning” in the middle of the page):

`https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/user-guide/evaluating-models/#comparing-nlu-pipelines`

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**Author:** ![Tanja](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.rasa.com/tanja/32/4696_2.png) [@Tanja](https://forum.rasa.com/u/Tanja)\
**Post date:** [October 14, 2019, 7:41am UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533/5 "2019-10-14T07:41:08Z")

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Good catch. The warning is incorrect. I can confirm that the `WhitespaceTokenizer` splits `Brian's` into multiple tokens.

I created an issue to update the docs: [Incorrect warning about WhitespaceTokenizer · Issue #4605 · RasaHQ/rasa · GitHub](https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa/issues/4605)

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**Author:** ![mmm3bbb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@mmm3bbb](https://forum.rasa.com/u/mmm3bbb)\
**Post date:** [October 15, 2019, 5:34pm UTC](https://forum.rasa.com/t/what-is-format-for-marking-up-possessives-on-entities-toms/19533/6 "2019-10-15T17:34:01Z")

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Thanks again.