diff --git a/spacy/gold.pyx b/spacy/gold.pyx
index 69e256167..91204f671 100644
--- a/spacy/gold.pyx
+++ b/spacy/gold.pyx
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ import srsly
 
 from . import _align
 from .syntax import nonproj
-from .tokens import Doc
+from .tokens import Doc, Span
 from .errors import Errors
 from . import util
 from .util import minibatch, itershuffle
@@ -659,6 +659,24 @@ def biluo_tags_from_offsets(doc, entities, missing='O'):
     return biluo
 
 
+def spans_from_biluo_tags(doc, tags):
+    """Encode per-token tags following the BILUO scheme into Span object, e.g.
+    to overwrite the doc.ents.
+
+    doc (Doc): The document that the BILUO tags refer to.
+    entities (iterable): A sequence of BILUO tags with each tag describing one
+        token. Each tags string will be of the form of either "", "O" or
+        "{action}-{label}", where action is one of "B", "I", "L", "U".
+    RETURNS (list): A sequence of Span objects.
+    """
+    token_offsets = tags_to_entities(tags)
+    spans = []
+    for label, start_idx, end_idx in token_offsets:
+        span = Span(doc, start_idx, end_idx + 1, label=label)
+        spans.append(span)
+    return spans
+
+
 def offsets_from_biluo_tags(doc, tags):
     """Encode per-token tags following the BILUO scheme into entity offsets.
 
@@ -670,12 +688,8 @@ def offsets_from_biluo_tags(doc, tags):
         `end` will be character-offset integers denoting the slice into the
         original string.
     """
-    token_offsets = tags_to_entities(tags)
-    offsets = []
-    for label, start_idx, end_idx in token_offsets:
-        span = doc[start_idx : end_idx + 1]
-        offsets.append((span.start_char, span.end_char, label))
-    return offsets
+    spans = spans_from_biluo_tags(doc, tags)
+    return [(span.start_char, span.end_char, span.label_) for span in spans]
 
 
 def is_punct_label(label):
diff --git a/spacy/tests/test_gold.py b/spacy/tests/test_gold.py
index 7c230f469..30dd2e6c6 100644
--- a/spacy/tests/test_gold.py
+++ b/spacy/tests/test_gold.py
@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 from __future__ import unicode_literals
 
 from spacy.gold import biluo_tags_from_offsets, offsets_from_biluo_tags
+from spacy.gold import spans_from_biluo_tags
 from spacy.tokens import Doc
 
 
@@ -50,3 +51,14 @@ def test_roundtrip_offsets_biluo_conversion(en_tokenizer):
     assert biluo_tags_converted == biluo_tags
     offsets_converted = offsets_from_biluo_tags(doc, biluo_tags)
     assert offsets_converted == offsets
+
+
+def test_biluo_spans(en_tokenizer):
+    doc = en_tokenizer("I flew to Silicon Valley via London.")
+    biluo_tags = ["O", "O", "O", "B-LOC", "L-LOC", "O", "U-GPE", "O"]
+    spans = spans_from_biluo_tags(doc, biluo_tags)
+    assert len(spans) == 2
+    assert spans[0].text == "Silicon Valley"
+    assert spans[0].label_ == "LOC"
+    assert spans[1].text == "London"
+    assert spans[1].label_ == "GPE"