Help with ellipsis (zero-width span)

[محمد علي‎]

I am working on a new annotation scheme for treebank. One of the structures I am focusing on is ellipsis, which occurs when a word is present in the syntactic structure but does not appear in the surface text and is recoverable from context. I am using the latest version of INCEpTION (version 40).

I attempted to use zero-width spans; however, when I hold Shift and click on the position where I want to  annotate the ellipsis, I get a blank space in INCEpTION, and I cannot proceed with the annotation.

My question: Is there a way to use zero-width spans in this case, or would you recommend using a different version of INCEpTION or any other solution?

[Richard Eckart de Castilho]

Hi,

> On 26. Mar 2026, at 15:42, ⁨محمد علي⁩ <⁨zmh...@gmail.com⁩> wrote:
>
> I am working on a new annotation scheme for treebank. One of the structures I am focusing on is ellipsis, which occurs when a word is present in the syntactic structure but does not appear in the surface text and is recoverable from context. I am using the latest version of INCEpTION (version 40).
> I attempted to use zero-width spans; however, when I hold Shift and click on the position where I want to annotate the ellipsis, I get a blank space in INCEpTION, and I cannot proceed with the annotation.

I believe zero-width annotations should be a good approach to modelling ellipsis in INCEpTION.

I just tried creating zero-width entity annotations on our public INCEpTION demo instance (running 40.0)
using shift-click and had no issues with that. Can you maybe provide a screenshot that illustrates
your problem?

Cheers,

-- Richard

[Mohammed Ali]

thank,

I add an explanational comment in the first screenshot (1.png).

[Richard Eckart de Castilho]

Hello,

> On 28. Mar 2026, at 17:10, Mohammed Ali <zmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I add an explanational comment in the first screenshot (1.png).

It is a bug in the RTL rendering code.

https://github.com/inception-project/inception/issues/5945

I have just released INCEpTION 40.1 which should fix that particular problem.
I hope to be able to fix a few additional RTL issues in the upcoming 41.0,
but that will take some time.

Thanks for the report!

-- Richard