spaCy/README.rst

spaCy: Industrial-strength NLP
******************************

spaCy is a library for advanced natural language processing in Python and
Cython. spaCy is built on  the very latest research, but it isn't researchware.
It was designed from day one to be used in real products. spaCy currently supports
English and German,  as well as tokenization for Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French,
Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian and Bengali. It's commercial  open-source
software, released under the MIT license.

💫 **Version 1.6 out now!** `Read the release notes here. <https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/>`_

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/travis/explosion/spaCy/master.svg?style=flat-square
    :target: https://travis-ci.org/explosion/spaCy
    :alt: Build Status

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/github/release/explosion/spacy.svg?style=flat-square
    :target: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases
    :alt: Current Release Version

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/spacy.svg?style=flat-square
    :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spacy
    :alt: pypi Version

.. image:: https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/spacy/badges/version.svg
    :target: https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/spacy
    :alt: conda Version

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/badge/gitter-join%20chat%20%E2%86%92-09a3d5.svg?style=flat-square
    :target: https://gitter.im/explosion/spaCy
    :alt: spaCy on Gitter

.. image:: https://img.shields.io/twitter/follow/spacy_io.svg?style=social&label=Follow
    :target: https://twitter.com/spacy_io
    :alt: spaCy on Twitter

📖 Documentation
================

=================== ===
`Usage Workflows`_  How to use spaCy and its features.
`API Reference`_    The detailed reference for spaCy's API.
`Tutorials`_        End-to-end examples, with code you can modify and run.
`Showcase & Demos`_ Demos, libraries and products from the spaCy community.
`Contribute`_       How to contribute to the spaCy project and code base.
=================== ===

.. _Usage Workflows: https://spacy.io/docs/usage/
.. _API Reference: https://spacy.io/docs/api/
.. _Tutorials: https://spacy.io/docs/usage/tutorials
.. _Showcase & Demos: https://spacy.io/docs/usage/showcase
.. _Contribute: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

💬 Where to ask questions
==========================

====================== ===
**Bug reports**        `GitHub issue tracker`_
**Usage questions**    `StackOverflow`_, `Gitter chat`_, `Reddit user group`_
**General discussion** `Gitter chat`_, `Reddit user group`_
**Commercial support** contact@explosion.ai
====================== ===

.. _GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues
.. _StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/spacy
.. _Gitter chat: https://gitter.im/explosion/spaCy
.. _Reddit user group: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacynlp

Features
========

* Non-destructive **tokenization**
* Syntax-driven sentence segmentation
* Pre-trained **word vectors**
* Part-of-speech tagging
* **Named entity** recognition
* Labelled dependency parsing
* Convenient string-to-int mapping
* Export to numpy data arrays
* GIL-free **multi-threading**
* Efficient binary serialization
* Easy **deep learning** integration
* Statistical models for **English** and **German**
* State-of-the-art speed
* Robust, rigorously evaluated accuracy

See `facts, figures and benchmarks <https://spacy.io/docs/api/>`_.

Top Performance
---------------

* Fastest in the world: <50ms per document.  No faster system has ever been
  announced.
* Accuracy within 1% of the current state of the art on all tasks performed
  (parsing, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging).  The only more
  accurate systems are an order of magnitude slower or more.

Supports
--------

==================== ===
**Operating system** macOS / OS X, Linux, Windows (Cygwin, MinGW, Visual Studio)
**Python version**   CPython 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5. Only 64 bit.
**Package managers** `pip`_ (source packages only), `conda`_ (via ``conda-forge``)
==================== ===

.. _pip: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spacy
.. _conda: https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/spacy

Install spaCy
=============

Installation requires a working build environment. See notes on Ubuntu,
macOS/OS X and Windows for details.

pip
---

Using pip, spaCy releases are currently only available as source packages.

.. code:: bash

    pip install -U spacy

When using pip it is generally recommended to install packages in a ``virtualenv``
to avoid modifying system state:

.. code:: bash

    virtualenv .env
    source .env/bin/activate
    pip install spacy

conda
-----

Thanks to our great community, we've finally re-added conda support. You can now
install spaCy via ``conda-forge``:

.. code:: bash

    conda config --add channels conda-forge
    conda install spacy

For the feedstock including the build recipe and configuration,
check out `this repository <https://github.com/conda-forge/spacy-feedstock>`_.
Improvements and pull requests to the recipe and setup are always appreciated.

Download models
===============

After installation you need to download a language model. Models for English
(``en``) and German (``de``) are available.

.. code:: bash

    python -m spacy.en.download all
    python -m spacy.de.download all

The download command fetches about 1 GB of data which it installs
within the ``spacy`` package directory.

Sometimes new releases require a new language model. Then you will have to
upgrade to a new model, too. You can also force re-downloading and installing a
new language model:

.. code:: bash

    python -m spacy.en.download --force

Download model to custom location
---------------------------------

You can specify where ``spacy.en.download`` and ``spacy.de.download`` download
the language model to using the ``--data-path`` or ``-d`` argument:

.. code:: bash

    python -m spacy.en.download all --data-path /some/dir

If you choose to download to a custom location, you will need to tell spaCy where to load the model
from in order to use it. You can do this either by calling ``spacy.util.set_data_path()`` before
calling ``spacy.load()``, or by passing a ``path`` argument to the ``spacy.en.English`` or
``spacy.de.German`` constructors.

Download models manually
------------------------

As of v1.6, the models and word vectors are also available as direct downloads
from GitHub, attached to the `releases <https://github.com/explosion/spacy/releases>`_
as ``.tar.gz`` archives.

To install the models manually, first find the default data path. You can use
``spacy.util.get_data_path()`` to find the directory where spaCy will look for
its models, or change the default data path with ``spacy.util.set_data_path()``.
Then simply unpack the archive and place the contained folder in that directory.
You can now load the models via ``spacy.load()``.

Compile from source
===================

The other way to install spaCy is to clone its
`GitHub repository <https://github.com/explosion/spaCy>`_ 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 enviroment consisting of a
Python distribution including header files, a compiler,
`pip <https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing/>`__, `virtualenv <https://virtualenv.pypa.io/>`_
and `git <https://git-scm.com>`_ 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.

.. code:: bash

    # make sure you are using recent pip/virtualenv versions
    python -m pip install -U pip virtualenv
    git clone https://github.com/explosion/spaCy
    cd spaCy

    virtualenv .env
    source .env/bin/activate
    pip install -r requirements.txt
    pip install -e .

Compared to regular install via pip `requirements.txt <requirements.txt>`_
additionally installs developer dependencies such as Cython.

Instead of the above verbose commands, you can also use the following
`Fabric <http://www.fabfile.org/>`_ commands:

============= ===
``fab env``   Create ``virtualenv`` and delete previous one, if it exists.
``fab make``  Compile the source.
``fab clean`` Remove compiled objects, including the generated C++.
``fab test``  Run basic tests, aborting after first failure.
============= ===

All commands assume that your ``virtualenv`` is located in a directory ``.env``.
If you're using a different directory, you can change it via the environment
variable ``VENV_DIR``, for example:

.. code:: bash

    VENV_DIR=".custom-env" fab clean make

Ubuntu
------

Install system-level dependencies via ``apt-get``:

.. code:: bash

    sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev git

macOS / OS X
------------

Install a recent version of `XCode <https://developer.apple.com/xcode/>`_,
including the so-called "Command Line Tools". macOS and OS X ship with Python
and git preinstalled.

Windows
-------

Install a version of `Visual Studio Express <https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-express/>`_
or higher 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 <spacy/tests>`_. First, find out where
spaCy is installed:

.. code:: bash

    python -c "import os; import spacy; print(os.path.dirname(spacy.__file__))"

Then run ``pytest`` on that directory. The flags ``--vectors``, ``--slow``
and ``--model`` are optional and enable additional tests:

.. code:: bash

    # make sure you are using recent pytest version
    python -m pip install -U pytest

    python -m pytest <spacy-directory> --vectors --model --slow

🛠 Changelog
===========

=========== ============== ===========
Version     Date           Description
=========== ============== ===========
`v1.6.0`_   ``2017-01-16`` Improvements to tokenizer and tests
`v1.5.0`_   ``2016-12-27`` Alpha support for Swedish and Hungarian
`v1.4.0`_   ``2016-12-18`` Improved language data and alpha Dutch support
`v1.3.0`_   ``2016-12-03`` Improve API consistency
`v1.2.0`_   ``2016-11-04`` Alpha tokenizers for Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
`v1.1.0`_   ``2016-10-23`` Bug fixes and adjustments
`v1.0.0`_   ``2016-10-18`` Support for deep learning workflows and entity-aware rule matcher
`v0.101.0`_ ``2016-05-10`` Fixed German model
`v0.100.7`_ ``2016-05-05`` German support
`v0.100.6`_ ``2016-03-08`` Add support for GloVe vectors
`v0.100.5`_ ``2016-02-07`` Fix incorrect use of header file
`v0.100.4`_ ``2016-02-07`` Fix OSX problem introduced in 0.100.3
`v0.100.3`_ ``2016-02-06`` Multi-threading, faster loading and bugfixes
`v0.100.2`_ ``2016-01-21`` Fix data version lock
`v0.100.1`_ ``2016-01-21`` Fix install for OSX
`v0.100`_   ``2016-01-19`` Revise setup.py, better model downloads, bug fixes
`v0.99`_    ``2015-11-08`` Improve span merging, internal refactoring
`v0.98`_    ``2015-11-03`` Smaller package, bug fixes
`v0.97`_    ``2015-10-23`` Load the StringStore from a json list, instead of a text file
`v0.96`_    ``2015-10-19`` Hotfix to .merge method
`v0.95`_    ``2015-10-18`` Bug fixes
`v0.94`_    ``2015-10-09`` Fix memory and parse errors
`v0.93`_    ``2015-09-22`` Bug fixes to word vectors
=========== ============== ===========

.. _v1.6.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v1.6.0
.. _v1.5.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v1.5.0
.. _v1.4.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v1.4.0
.. _v1.3.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v1.3.0
.. _v1.2.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v1.2.0
.. _v1.1.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v1.1.0
.. _v1.0.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/v1.0.0
.. _v0.101.0: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.101.0
.. _v0.100.7: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100.7
.. _v0.100.6: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100.6
.. _v0.100.5: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100.5
.. _v0.100.4: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100.4
.. _v0.100.3: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100.3
.. _v0.100.2: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100.2
.. _v0.100.1: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100.1
.. _v0.100: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.100
.. _v0.99: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.99
.. _v0.98: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.98
.. _v0.97: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.97
.. _v0.96: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.96
.. _v0.95: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.95
.. _v0.94: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.94
.. _v0.93: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/releases/tag/0.93