---
name: watson-knowledge-studio-enabling-cross-sentence-relations
title: Enabling cross-sentence relations (Experimental)
description: English entities and relations workspaces that you create can support annotating relations between pairs of entity mentions that exist within spans of six sentences. In workspaces where the cross-sentence relations feature is not enabled, the ground truth editor and runtime models do not support annotating relations that cross sentence boundaries.
last-updated: 2020-06-24
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-knowledge-studio?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

{:shortdesc: .shortdesc}
{:external: target="_blank" .external}
{:deprecated: .deprecated}
{:important: .important}
{:note: .note}
{:tip: .tip}
{:preview: .preview}
{:beta: .beta}
{:pre: .pre}
{:codeblock: .codeblock}
{:screen: .screen}

# Enabling cross-sentence relations (Experimental)
{: #enabling-cross-sentence-relations}

English entities and relations workspaces that you create can support annotating relations between pairs of entity mentions that exist within spans of six sentences. In workspaces where the cross-sentence relations feature is not enabled, the ground truth editor and runtime models do not support annotating relations that cross sentence boundaries.
{: shortdesc}

Cross-sentence relations is an experimental feature that might be discontinued without notice. It is not recommended to use this feature in a production environment.
{: important}

Enabling cross-sentence relations might decrease the performance of the ground truth editor and the performance of any models that you deploy from the workspace at runtime.
The cross-sentence relations setting cannot be changed for a workspace after it is created.
{: note}

For example, if you plan to annotate a relation for an entity mention in the seventh sentence below, you are limited to selecting other entity mentions only in the seventh sentence unless you enable cross-sentence relations. With the feature enabled, you can annotate a related entity mention within a span of six sentences (across up to five sentence boundaries), so the second entity mention in the relation could be annotated anywhere from the second sentence to the twelfth sentence.

```
Sentence 1.
*** Sentence 2.
Sentence 3.
Sentence 4.
Sentence 5.
Sentence 6.
-----> Sentence 7.
Sentence 8.
Sentence 9.
Sentence 10.
Sentence 11.
*** Sentence 12.
Sentence 13.
```

## Procedure
{: #enabling-cross-sentence-relations-procedure}

1. Launch the Knowledge Studio application.
1. If you have existing workspaces, click **Create Workspace**.
1. Click **Create entities and relations workspace**.
1. Click **Advanced options**. 
1. Click the **Enable cross sentence relations** box.
1. Click **Create**.

In the new workspace, you will be able to annotate relations between pairs of entity mentions that exist within spans of six sentences.