spaCy/website/docs/usage/data-model.jade

//- 💫 DOCS > USAGE > SPACY'S DATA MODEL

include ../../_includes/_mixins

p After reading this page, you should be able to:

+list
    +item Understand how spaCy's Doc, Span, Token and Lexeme object work
    +item Start using spaCy's Cython API
    +item Use spaCy more efficiently

+h(2, "architecture") Architecture

+image
    include ../../assets/img/docs/architecture.svg

+h(2, "design-considerations") Design considerations

+h(3, "no-job-too-big") No job too big

p
    |  When writing spaCy, one of my mottos was #[em no job too big]. I wanted
    |  to make sure that if Google or Facebook were founded tomorrow, spaCy
    |  would be the obvious choice for them. I wanted spaCy to be the obvious
    |  choice for web-scale NLP. This meant sweating about performance, because
    |  for web-scale tasks, Moore's law can't save you.

p
    |  Most computational work gets less expensive over time. If you wrote a
    |  program to solve fluid dynamics in 2008, and you ran it again in 2014,
    |  you would expect it to be cheaper. For NLP, it often doesn't work out
    |  that way. The problem is that we're writing programs where the task is
    |  something like "Process all  articles in the English Wikipedia". Sure,
    |  compute prices dropped from $0.80 per hour to $0.20 per hour on AWS in
    |  2008-2014. But the size of Wikipedia grew from 3GB to 11GB. Maybe the
    |  job is a #[em little] cheaper in 2014 — but not by much.

+h(3, "annotation-layers") Multiple layers of annotation

p
    |  When I tell a certain sort of person that I'm a computational linguist,
    |  this comic is often the first thing that comes to their mind:

+image("http://i.imgur.com/n3DTzqx.png", 450)
    +image-caption © #[+a("http://xkcd.com") xkcd]

p
    |  I've thought a lot about what this comic is really trying to say. It's
    |  probably not talking about #[em data models] — but in that sense at
    |  least, it really rings true.

p
    |  You'll often need to model a document as a sequence of sentences. Other
    |  times you'll need to model it as a sequence of words. Sometimes you'll
    |  care about paragraphs, other times you won't. Sometimes you'll care
    |  about extracting quotes, which can cross paragraph boundaries. A quote
    |  can also occur within a sentence. When we consider sentence structure,
    |  things get even more complicated and contradictory. We have syntactic
    |  trees, sequences of entities, sequences of phrases, sub-word units,
    |  multi-word units...

p
    |  Different applications are going to need to query different,
    |  overlapping, and often contradictory views of the document. They're
    |  often going to need to query them jointly. You need to be able to get
    |  the syntactic head of a named entity, or the sentiment of a paragraph.

+h(2, "solutions") Solutions

+h(3) Fat types, thin tokens

+h(3) Static model, dynamic views

p
    |  Different applications are going to need to query different,
    |  overlapping, and often contradictory views of the document. For this
    |  reason, I think it's a bad idea to have too much of the document
    |  structure reflected in the data model. If you structure the data
    |  according to the needs of one layer of annotation, you're going to need
    |  to copy the data and transform it in order to use a different layer of
    |  annotation. You'll soon have lots of copies, and no single source of
    |  truth.

+h(3) Never go full stand-off

+h(3) Implementation

+h(3) Cython 101

+h(3) #[code cdef class Doc]

p
    |  Let's start at the top. Here's the memory layout of the
    |  #[+api("doc") #[code Doc]] class, minus irrelevant details:

+code.
    from cymem.cymem cimport Pool
    from ..vocab cimport Vocab
    from ..structs cimport TokenC

    cdef class Doc:
        cdef Pool mem
        cdef Vocab vocab

        cdef TokenC* c

        cdef int length
        cdef int max_length

p
    |  So, our #[code Doc] class is a wrapper around a TokenC* array — that's
    |  where the actual document content is stored. Here's the #[code TokenC]
    |  struct, in its entirety:

+h(3) #[code cdef struct TokenC]

+code.
    cdef struct TokenC:
        const LexemeC* lex
        uint64_t morph
        univ_pos_t pos
        bint spacy
        int tag
        int idx
        int lemma
        int sense
        int head
        int dep
        bint sent_start

        uint32_t l_kids
        uint32_t r_kids
        uint32_t l_edge
        uint32_t r_edge

        int ent_iob
        int ent_type # TODO: Is there a better way to do this? Multiple sources of truth..
        hash_t ent_id

p
    |  The token owns all of its linguistic annotations, and holds a const
    |  pointer to a #[code LexemeC] struct. The #[code LexemeC] struct owns all
    |  of the #[em vocabulary] data about the word — all the dictionary
    |  definition stuff that we want to be shared by all instances of the type.
    |  Here's the #[code LexemeC] struct, in its entirety:

+h(3) #[code cdef struct LexemeC]

+code.
    cdef struct LexemeC:

        int32_t id

        int32_t orth     # Allows the string to be retrieved
        int32_t length   # Length of the string

        uint64_t flags   # These are the most useful parts.
        int32_t cluster  # Distributional similarity cluster
        float prob       # Probability
        float sentiment  # Slot for sentiment

        int32_t lang

        int32_t lower    # These string views made sense
        int32_t norm     # when NLP meant linear models.
        int32_t shape    # Now they're less relevant, and
        int32_t prefix   # will probably be revised.
        int32_t suffix

        float* vector # <-- This was a design mistake, and will change.

+h(2, "dynamic-views") Dynamic views

+h(3) Text

p
    |  You might have noticed that in all of the structs above, there's not a
    |  string to be found. The strings are all stored separately, in the
    |  #[+api("stringstore") #[code StringStore]] class. The lexemes don't know
    |  the strings — they only know their integer IDs. The document string is
    |  never stored anywhere, either. Instead, it's reconstructed by iterating
    |  over the tokens, which look up the #[code orth] attribute of their
    |  underlying lexeme. Once we have the orth ID, we can fetch the string
    |  from the vocabulary. Finally, each token knows whether a single
    |  whitespace character (#[code ' ']) should be used to separate it from
    |  the subsequent tokens. This allows us to preserve whitespace.

+code.
    cdef print_text(Vocab vocab, const TokenC* tokens, int length):
        for i in range(length):
            word_string = vocab.strings[tokens.lex.orth]
            if tokens.lex.spacy:
                word_string += ' '
            print(word_string)

p
    |  This is why you get whitespace tokens in spaCy — we need those tokens,
    |  so that we can reconstruct the document string. I also think you should
    |  have those tokens anyway. Most NLP libraries strip them, making it very
    |  difficult to recover the paragraph information once you're at the token
    |  level. You'll never have that sort of problem with spaCy — because
    |  there's a single source of truth.

+h(3) #[code cdef class Token]

p When you do...

+code.
    doc[i]

p
    |  ...you get back an instance of class #[code spacy.tokens.token.Token].
    |  This instance owns no data. Instead, it holds the information
    |  #[code (doc, i)], and uses these to retrieve all information via the
    |  parent container.

+h(3) #[code cdef class Span]

p When you do...

+code.
    doc[i : j]

p
    |  ...you get back an instance of class #[code spacy.tokens.span.Span].
    |  #[code Span] instances are also returned by the #[code .sents],
    |  #[code .ents] and #[code .noun_chunks] iterators of the #[code Doc]
    |  object. A #[code Span] is a slice of tokens, with an optional label
    |  attached. Its data model is:

+code.
    cdef class Span:
        cdef readonly Doc doc
        cdef int start
        cdef int end
        cdef int start_char
        cdef int end_char
        cdef int label

p
    |  Once again, the #[code Span] owns almost no data. Instead, it refers
    |  back to the parent #[code Doc] container.

p
    |  The #[code start] and #[code end] attributes refer to token positions,
    |  while #[code start_char] and #[code end_char] record the character
    |  positions of the span. By recording the character offsets, we can still
    |  use the #[code Span] object if the tokenization of the document changes.

+h(3) #[code cdef class Lexeme]

p When you do...

+code.
    vocab[u'the']

p
    |  ...you get back an instance of class #[code spacy.lexeme.Lexeme]. The
    |  #[code Lexeme]'s data model is:

+code.
    cdef class Lexeme:
        cdef LexemeC* c
        cdef readonly Vocab vocab