mirror of https://github.com/explosion/spaCy.git
261 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
261 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Facts & Figures
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teaser: The hard numbers for spaCy and how it compares to other tools
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next: /usage/spacy-101
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menu:
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- ['Feature Comparison', 'comparison']
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- ['Benchmarks', 'benchmarks']
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- ['Powered by spaCy', 'powered-by']
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- ['Other Libraries', 'other-libraries']
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---
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## Feature comparison {#comparison}
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Here's a quick comparison of the functionalities offered by spaCy,
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[NLTK](http://www.nltk.org/py-modindex.html) and
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[CoreNLP](http://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/).
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| | spaCy | NLTK | CoreNLP |
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| ----------------------- | :----: | :----: | :-----------: |
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| Programming language | Python | Python | Java / Python |
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| Neural network models | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
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| Integrated word vectors | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
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| Multi-language support | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
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| Tokenization | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
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| Part-of-speech tagging | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
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| Sentence segmentation | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
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| Dependency parsing | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
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| Entity recognition | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
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| Entity linking | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
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| Coreference resolution | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
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### When should I use what?
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Natural Language Understanding is an active area of research and development, so
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there are many different tools or technologies catering to different use-cases.
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The table below summarizes a few libraries (spaCy,
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[NLTK](http://www.nltk.org/py-modindex.html), [AllenNLP](https://allennlp.org/),
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[StanfordNLP](https://stanfordnlp.github.io/stanfordnlp/) and
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[TensorFlow](https://www.tensorflow.org/)) to help you get a feel for things fit
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together.
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| | spaCy | NLTK | Allen-<br />NLP | Stanford-<br />NLP | Tensor-<br />Flow |
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| ----------------------------------------------------------------- | :---: | :--: | :-------------: | :----------------: | :---------------: |
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| I'm a beginner and just getting started with NLP. | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ |
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| I want to build an end-to-end production application. | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
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| I want to try out different neural network architectures for NLP. | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
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| I want to try the latest models with state-of-the-art accuracy. | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
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| I want to train models from my own data. | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
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| I want my application to be efficient on CPU. | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
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## Benchmarks {#benchmarks}
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Two peer-reviewed papers in 2015 confirm that spaCy offers the **fastest
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syntactic parser in the world** and that **its accuracy is within 1% of the
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best** available. The few systems that are more accurate are 20× slower or more.
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> #### About the evaluation
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>
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> The first of the evaluations was published by **Yahoo! Labs** and **Emory
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> University**, as part of a survey of current parsing technologies
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> ([Choi et al., 2015](https://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P15/P15-1038.pdf)). Their
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> results and subsequent discussions helped us develop a novel
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> psychologically-motivated technique to improve spaCy's accuracy, which we
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> published in joint work with Macquarie University
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> ([Honnibal and Johnson, 2015](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D/D15/D15-1162.pdf)).
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import BenchmarksChoi from 'usage/\_benchmarks-choi.md'
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<BenchmarksChoi />
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### Algorithm comparison {#algorithm}
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In this section, we compare spaCy's algorithms to recently published systems,
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using some of the most popular benchmarks. These benchmarks are designed to help
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isolate the contributions of specific algorithmic decisions, so they promote
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slightly "idealized" conditions. Specifically, the text comes pre-processed with
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"gold standard" token and sentence boundaries. The data sets also tend to be
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fairly small, to help researchers iterate quickly. These conditions mean the
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models trained on these data sets are not always useful for practical purposes.
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#### Parse accuracy (Penn Treebank / Wall Street Journal) {#parse-accuracy-penn}
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This is the "classic" evaluation, so it's the number parsing researchers are
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most easily able to put in context. However, it's quite far removed from actual
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usage: it uses sentences with gold-standard segmentation and tokenization, from
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a pretty specific type of text (articles from a single newspaper, 1984-1989).
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> #### Methodology
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>
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> [Andor et al. (2016)](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06042) chose slightly
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> different experimental conditions from
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> [Choi et al. (2015)](https://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P15/P15-1038.pdf), so the
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> two accuracy tables here do not present directly comparable figures.
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| System | Year | Type | Accuracy |
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| ------------------------------------------------------------ | ---- | ------ | --------: |
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| spaCy v2.0.0 | 2017 | neural | 94.48 |
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| spaCy v1.1.0 | 2016 | linear | 92.80 |
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| [Dozat and Manning][dozat and manning] | 2017 | neural | **95.75** |
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| [Andor et al.][andor et al.] | 2016 | neural | 94.44 |
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| [SyntaxNet Parsey McParseface][syntaxnet parsey mcparseface] | 2016 | neural | 94.15 |
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| [Weiss et al.][weiss et al.] | 2015 | neural | 93.91 |
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| [Zhang and McDonald][zhang and mcdonald] | 2014 | linear | 93.32 |
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| [Martins et al.][martins et al.] | 2013 | linear | 93.10 |
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[dozat and manning]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.01734.pdf
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[andor et al.]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.06042
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[syntaxnet parsey mcparseface]:
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https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/syntaxnet
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[weiss et al.]:
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http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43800.pdf
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[zhang and mcdonald]: http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/38148.pdf
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[martins et al.]: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ark/TurboParser/
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#### NER accuracy (OntoNotes 5, no pre-process) {#ner-accuracy-ontonotes5}
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This is the evaluation we use to tune spaCy's parameters to decide which
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algorithms are better than the others. It's reasonably close to actual usage,
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because it requires the parses to be produced from raw text, without any
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pre-processing.
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| System | Year | Type | Accuracy |
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| -------------------------------------------------- | ---- | ------ | --------: |
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| spaCy [`en_core_web_lg`][en_core_web_lg] v2.0.0a3 | 2017 | neural | 85.85 |
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| [Strubell et al.][strubell et al.] | 2017 | neural | **86.81** |
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| [Chiu and Nichols][chiu and nichols] | 2016 | neural | 86.19 |
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| [Durrett and Klein][durrett and klein] | 2014 | neural | 84.04 |
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| [Ratinov and Roth][ratinov and roth] | 2009 | linear | 83.45 |
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[en_core_web_lg]: /models/en#en_core_web_lg
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[strubell et al.]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.02098.pdf
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[chiu and nichols]:
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https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Named-Entity-Recognition-with-Bidirectional-LSTM-C-Chiu-Nichols/10a4db59e81d26b2e0e896d3186ef81b4458b93f
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[durrett and klein]:
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https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Joint-Model-for-Entity-Analysis-Coreference-Typi-Durrett-Klein/28eb033eee5f51c5e5389cbb6b777779203a6778
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[ratinov and roth]: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W09-1119
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### Model comparison {#spacy-models}
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In this section, we provide benchmark accuracies for the pre-trained model
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pipelines we distribute with spaCy. Evaluations are conducted end-to-end from
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raw text, with no "gold standard" pre-processing, over text from a mix of genres
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where possible.
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> #### Methodology
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>
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> The evaluation was conducted on raw text with no gold standard information.
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> The parser, tagger and entity recognizer were trained on the
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> [OntoNotes 5](https://www.gabormelli.com/RKB/OntoNotes_Corpus) corpus, the
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> word vectors on [Common Crawl](http://commoncrawl.org).
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#### English {#benchmarks-models-english}
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| Model | spaCy | Type | UAS | NER F | POS | WPS | Size |
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| --------------------------------------------------- | ----- | ------ | -------: | -------: | -------: | --------: | -------: |
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| [`en_core_web_sm`](/models/en#en_core_web_sm) 2.0.0 | 2.x | neural | 91.7 | 85.3 | 97.0 | 10.1k | **35MB** |
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| [`en_core_web_md`](/models/en#en_core_web_md) 2.0.0 | 2.x | neural | 91.7 | **85.9** | 97.1 | 10.0k | 115MB |
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| [`en_core_web_lg`](/models/en#en_core_web_lg) 2.0.0 | 2.x | neural | **91.9** | **85.9** | **97.2** | 10.0k | 812MB |
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| `en_core_web_sm` 1.2.0 | 1.x | linear | 86.6 | 78.5 | 96.6 | **25.7k** | 50MB |
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| `en_core_web_md` 1.2.1 | 1.x | linear | 90.6 | 81.4 | 96.7 | 18.8k | 1GB |
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#### Spanish {#benchmarks-models-spanish}
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> #### Evaluation note
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>
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> The NER accuracy refers to the "silver standard" annotations in the WikiNER
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> corpus. Accuracy on these annotations tends to be higher than correct human
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> annotations.
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| Model | spaCy | Type | UAS | NER F | POS | WPS | Size |
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| ----------------------------------------------------- | ----- | ------ | -------: | -------: | -------: | ----: | -------: |
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| [`es_core_news_sm`](/models/es#es_core_news_sm) 2.0.0 | 2.x | neural | 89.8 | 88.7 | **96.9** | _n/a_ | **35MB** |
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| [`es_core_news_md`](/models/es#es_core_news_md) 2.0.0 | 2.x | neural | **90.2** | 89.0 | 97.8 | _n/a_ | 93MB |
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| `es_core_web_md` 1.1.0 | 1.x | linear | 87.5 | **94.2** | 96.7 | _n/a_ | 377MB |
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### Detailed speed comparison {#speed-comparison}
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Here we compare the per-document processing time of various spaCy
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functionalities against other NLP libraries. We show both absolute timings (in
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ms) and relative performance (normalized to spaCy). Lower is better.
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<Infobox title="Important note" variant="warning">
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This evaluation was conducted in 2015. We're working on benchmarks on current
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CPU and GPU hardware. In the meantime, we're grateful to the Stanford folks for
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drawing our attention to what seems to be
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[a long-standing error](https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tokenizer.html#Speed)
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in our CoreNLP benchmarks, especially for their tokenizer. Until we run
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corrected experiments, we have updated the table using their figures.
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</Infobox>
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> #### Methodology
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>
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> - **Set up:** 100,000 plain-text documents were streamed from an SQLite3
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> database, and processed with an NLP library, to one of three levels of
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> detail — tokenization, tagging, or parsing. The tasks are additive: to parse
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> the text you have to tokenize and tag it. The pre-processing was not
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> subtracted from the times — we report the time required for the pipeline to
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> complete. We report mean times per document, in milliseconds.
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> - **Hardware**: Intel i7-3770 (2012)
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> - **Implementation**:
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> [`spacy-benchmarks`](https://github.com/explosion/spacy-benchmarks)
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<Table>
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<thead>
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<Tr>
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<Th></Th>
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<Th colSpan="3">Absolute (ms per doc)</Th>
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<Th colSpan="3">Relative (to spaCy)</Th>
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</Tr>
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<Tr>
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<Th>System</Th>
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<Th>Tokenize</Th>
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<Th>Tag</Th>
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<Th>Parse</Th>
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<Th>Tokenize</Th>
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<Th>Tag</Th>
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<Th>Parse</Th>
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</Tr>
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</thead>
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<tbody style="text-align: right">
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<Tr>
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<Td style="text-align: left"><strong>spaCy</strong></Td>
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<Td>0.2ms</Td>
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<Td>1ms</Td>
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<Td>19ms</Td>
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<Td>1x</Td>
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<Td>1x</Td>
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<Td>1x</Td>
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</Tr>
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<Tr>
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<Td style="text-align: left">CoreNLP</Td>
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<Td>0.18ms</Td>
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<Td>10ms</Td>
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<Td>49ms</Td>
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<Td>0.9x</Td>
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<Td>10x</Td>
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<Td>2.6x</Td>
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</Tr>
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<Tr>
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<Td style="text-align: left">ZPar</Td>
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<Td>1ms</Td>
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<Td>8ms</Td>
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<Td>850ms</Td>
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<Td>5x</Td>
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<Td>8x</Td>
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<Td>44.7x</Td>
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</Tr>
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<Tr>
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<Td style="text-align: left">NLTK</Td>
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<Td>4ms</Td>
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<Td>443ms</Td>
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<Td><em>n/a</em></Td>
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<Td>20x</Td>
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<Td>443x</Td>
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<Td><em>n/a</em></Td>
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</Tr>
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</tbody>
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</Table>
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