spaCy: Industrial-strength NLP
spaCy is a library for advanced Natural Language Processing in Python and Cython. It's built on the very latest research, and was designed from day one to be used in real products. spaCy comes with pretrained statistical models and word vectors, and currently supports tokenization for 60+ languages. It features state-of-the-art speed, convolutional neural network models for tagging, parsing and named entity recognition and easy deep learning integration. It's commercial open-source software, released under the MIT license.
π Documentation
Documentation | |
---|---|
spaCy 101 | New to spaCy? Here's everything you need to know! |
Usage Guides | How to use spaCy and its features. |
New in v2.3 | New features, backwards incompatibilities and migration guide. |
API Reference | The detailed reference for spaCy's API. |
Models | Download statistical language models for spaCy. |
Universe | Libraries, extensions, demos, books and courses. |
Changelog | Changes and version history. |
Contribute | How to contribute to the spaCy project and code base. |
π¬ Where to ask questions
The spaCy project is maintained by @honnibal and @ines, along with core contributors @svlandeg and @adrianeboyd. Please understand that we won't be able to provide individual support via email. We also believe that help is much more valuable if it's shared publicly, so that more people can benefit from it.
Type | Platforms |
---|---|
GitHub Issue Tracker | |
GitHub Discussions | |
GitHub Discussions Β· Stack Overflow | |
GitHub Discussions |
Features
- Non-destructive tokenization
- Named entity recognition
- Support for 50+ languages
- pretrained statistical models and word vectors
- State-of-the-art speed
- Easy deep learning integration
- Part-of-speech tagging
- Labelled dependency parsing
- Syntax-driven sentence segmentation
- Built in visualizers for syntax and NER
- Convenient string-to-hash mapping
- Export to numpy data arrays
- Efficient binary serialization
- Easy model packaging and deployment
- Robust, rigorously evaluated accuracy
Install spaCy
For detailed installation instructions, see the documentation.
- Operating system: macOS / OS X Β· Linux Β· Windows (Cygwin, MinGW, Visual Studio)
- Python version: Python 2.7, 3.5+ (only 64 bit)
- Package managers: pip Β· conda (via
conda-forge
)
pip
Using pip, spaCy releases are available as source packages and binary wheels (as
of v2.0.13
). Before you install spaCy and its dependencies, make sure that
pip
, setuptools
and wheel
are up to date.
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
pip install spacy
For installation on python 2.7 or 3.5 where binary wheels are not provided for
the most recent versions of the dependencies, you can prefer older binary
wheels over newer source packages with --prefer-binary
:
pip install spacy --prefer-binary
To install additional data tables for lemmatization and normalization in
spaCy v2.2+ you can run pip install spacy[lookups]
or install
spacy-lookups-data
separately. The lookups package is needed to create blank models with
lemmatization data for v2.2+ plus normalization data for v2.3+, and to
lemmatize in languages that don't yet come with pretrained models and aren't
powered by third-party libraries.
When using pip it is generally recommended to install packages in a virtual environment to avoid modifying system state:
python -m venv .env
source .env/bin/activate
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
pip install spacy
conda
Thanks to our great community, we've finally re-added conda support. You can now
install spaCy via conda-forge
:
conda install -c conda-forge spacy
For the feedstock including the build recipe and configuration, check out this repository. Improvements and pull requests to the recipe and setup are always appreciated.
Updating spaCy
Some updates to spaCy may require downloading new statistical models. If you're
running spaCy v2.0 or higher, you can use the validate
command to check if
your installed models are compatible and if not, print details on how to update
them:
pip install -U spacy
python -m spacy validate
If you've trained your own models, keep in mind that your training and runtime inputs must match. After updating spaCy, we recommend retraining your models with the new version.
Download models
As of v1.7.0, models for spaCy can be installed as Python packages. This
means that they're a component of your application, just like any other module.
Models can be installed using spaCy's download
command, or manually by
pointing pip to a path or URL.
Documentation | |
---|---|
Available Models | Detailed model descriptions, accuracy figures and benchmarks. |
Models Documentation | Detailed usage instructions. |
# download best-matching version of specific model for your spaCy installation
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
# pip install .tar.gz archive from path or URL
pip install /Users/you/en_core_web_sm-2.2.0.tar.gz
pip install https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-2.2.0/en_core_web_sm-2.2.0.tar.gz
Loading and using models
To load a model, use spacy.load()
with the model name, a shortcut link or a
path to the model data directory.
import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
doc = nlp("This is a sentence.")
You can also import
a model directly via its full name and then call its
load()
method with no arguments.
import spacy
import en_core_web_sm
nlp = en_core_web_sm.load()
doc = nlp("This is a sentence.")
Compile from source
The other way to install spaCy is to clone its GitHub repository and build it from source. That is the common way if you want to make changes to the code base. You'll need to make sure that you have a development environment consisting of a Python distribution including header files, a compiler, pip, virtualenv and git installed. The compiler part is the trickiest. How to do that depends on your system. See notes on Ubuntu, OS X and Windows for details.
git clone https://github.com/explosion/spaCy
cd spaCy
python -m venv .env
source .env/bin/activate
# make sure you are using the latest pip
python -m pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
pip install .
To install with extras:
pip install .[lookups,cuda102]
To install all dependencies required for development:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Compared to regular install via pip, requirements.txt additionally installs developer dependencies such as Cython. For more details and instructions, see the documentation on compiling spaCy from source and the quickstart widget to get the right commands for your platform and Python version.
Ubuntu
Install system-level dependencies via apt-get
:
sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev git
macOS / OS X
Install a recent version of XCode, including the so-called "Command Line Tools". macOS and OS X ship with Python and git preinstalled.
Windows
Install a version of the Visual C++ Build Tools or Visual Studio Express that matches the version that was used to compile your Python interpreter. For official distributions these are VS 2008 (Python 2.7), VS 2010 (Python 3.4) and VS 2015 (Python 3.5).
Run tests
spaCy comes with an extensive test suite. In order to run the
tests, you'll usually want to clone the repository and build spaCy from source.
This will also install the required development dependencies and test utilities
defined in the requirements.txt
.
Alternatively, you can run pytest
on the tests from within the installed
spacy
package. Don't forget to also install the test utilities via spaCy's
requirements.txt
:
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m pytest --pyargs spacy
See the documentation for more details and examples.