* Add post introducing spaCy

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Matthew Honnibal 2015-08-13 15:49:33 +02:00
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var urls = {
'pos_post': 'https://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/a-good-part-of-speechpos-tagger-in-about-200-lines-of-python/',
'google_ngrams': "http://googleresearch.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/syntactic-ngrams-over-time.html",
'implementation': 'https://gist.github.com/syllog1sm/10343947',
'redshift': 'http://github.com/syllog1sm/redshift',
'tasker': 'https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm',
'acl_anthology': 'http://aclweb.org/anthology/',
'share_twitter': 'http://twitter.com/share?text=[ARTICLE HEADLINE]&url=[ARTICLE LINK]&via=honnibal'
}
- var my_research_software = '<a href="https://github.com/syllog1sm/redshift/tree/develop">my research software</a>'
- var how_to_write_a_POS_tagger = '<a href="https://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/a-good-part-of-speechpos-tagger-in-about-200-lines-of-python/">how to write a part-of-speech tagger</a>'
- var parser_lnk = '<a href="https://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/a-simple-fast-algorithm-for-natural-language-dependency-parsing/">parser</a>'
- var buy_a_commercial_license = '<a href="license.html">buy a commercial license</a>'
doctype html
html(lang='en')
head
meta(charset='utf-8')
title spaCy Blog
meta(name='description', content='')
meta(name='author', content='Matthew Honnibal')
link(rel='stylesheet', href='css/style.css')
//if lt IE 9
script(src='http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js')
body#blog
header(role='banner')
h1.logo spaCy Blog
.slogan Blog
main#content(role='main')
article.post
p.
<strong>spaCy</strong> is a new library for text processing in Python
and Cython. I wrote it because I think small companies are terrible at
natural language processing (NLP). Or rather: small companies are using
terrible NLP technology.
p.
To do great NLP, you have to know a little about linguistics, a lot
about machine learning, and almost everything about the latest research.
The people who fit this description seldom join small companies.
Most are broke &ndash; they've just finished grad school.
If they don't want to stay in academia, they join Google, IBM, etc.
p.
The net result is that outside of the tech giants, commercial NLP has
changed little in the last ten years. In academia, it's changed entirely.
Amazing improvements in quality. Orders of magnitude faster. But the
academic code is always GPL, undocumented, unuseable, or all three.
You could implement the ideas yourself, but the papers are hard to read,
and training data is exorbitantly expensive. So what are you left with?
A common answer is NLTK, which was written primarily as an educational resource.
Nothing past the tokenizer is suitable for production use.
p.
I used to think that the NLP community just needed to do more to communicate
its findings to software engineers. So I wrote two blog posts, explaining
!{how_to_write_a_POS_tagger} and !{parser_lnk}. Both were well
received, and there's been a bit of interest in !{my_research_software}
&ndash; even though it's entirely undocumented, and mostly unuseable to
anyone but me.
p.
So six months ago I quit my post-doc, and I've been working day and night
on spaCy since. I'm now pleased to announce an alpha release.
p.
If you're a small company doing NLP, I think spaCy will seem like a minor
miracle. It's by far the fastest NLP software ever released. The
full processing pipeline completes in 20ms per document, including accurate
tagging and parsing. All strings are mapped to integer IDs, tokens are
linked to embedded word representations, and a range of useful features
are pre-calculated and cached.
p.
If none of that made any sense to you, here's the gist of it. Computers
don't understand text. This is unfortunate, because that's what the
web almost entirely consists of. We want to recommend people text based
on other text they liked. We want to shorten text to display it on a
mobile screen. We want to aggregate it, link it, filter it, categorise
it, generate it and correct it.
p.
spaCy provides a library of utility functions that help programmers
build such products. It's commercial open source software: you can
either use it under the AGPL, or you can !{buy_a_commercial_license}
under generous terms.
footer(role='contentinfo')