spaCy/website/docs/api/data-formats.md

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Data formats	Details on spaCy's input and output data formats	Training Data training Training Config config Vocabulary vocab

This section documents input and output formats of data used by spaCy, including training data and lexical vocabulary data. For an overview of label schemes used by the models, see the models directory. Each model documents the label schemes used in its components, depending on the data it was trained on.

Training data

Binary training format

JSON input format for training

spaCy takes training data in JSON format. The built-in convert command helps you convert the .conllu format used by the Universal Dependencies corpora to spaCy's training format. To convert one or more existing Doc objects to spaCy's JSON format, you can use the gold.docs_to_json helper.

Annotating entities

Named entities are provided in the BILUO notation. Tokens outside an entity are set to "O" and tokens that are part of an entity are set to the entity label, prefixed by the BILUO marker. For example "B-ORG" describes the first token of a multi-token ORG entity and "U-PERSON" a single token representing a PERSON entity. The biluo_tags_from_offsets function can help you convert entity offsets to the right format.

### Example structure
[{
    "id": int,                      # ID of the document within the corpus
    "paragraphs": [{                # list of paragraphs in the corpus
        "raw": string,              # raw text of the paragraph
        "sentences": [{             # list of sentences in the paragraph
            "tokens": [{            # list of tokens in the sentence
                "id": int,          # index of the token in the document
                "dep": string,      # dependency label
                "head": int,        # offset of token head relative to token index
                "tag": string,      # part-of-speech tag
                "orth": string,     # verbatim text of the token
                "ner": string       # BILUO label, e.g. "O" or "B-ORG"
            }],
            "brackets": [{          # phrase structure (NOT USED by current models)
                "first": int,       # index of first token
                "last": int,        # index of last token
                "label": string     # phrase label
            }]
        }],
        "cats": [{                  # new in v2.2: categories for text classifier
            "label": string,        # text category label
            "value": float / bool   # label applies (1.0/true) or not (0.0/false)
        }]
    }]
}]

Here's an example of dependencies, part-of-speech tags and names entities, taken from the English Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank:

https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/tree/master/examples/training/training-data.json

Training config

Config files define the training process and model pipeline and can be passed to spacy train. They use Thinc's configuration system under the hood. For details on how to use training configs, see the usage documentation.

The @ syntax lets you refer to function names registered in the function registry. For example, @architectures = "spacy.HashEmbedCNN.v1" refers to a registered function of the name "spacy.HashEmbedCNN.v1" and all other values defined in its block will be passed into that function as arguments. Those arguments depend on the registered function. See the model architectures docs for API details.

Lexical data for vocabulary

To populate a model's vocabulary, you can use the spacy init-model command and load in a newline-delimited JSON (JSONL) file containing one lexical entry per line via the --jsonl-loc option. The first line defines the language and vocabulary settings. All other lines are expected to be JSON objects describing an individual lexeme. The lexical attributes will be then set as attributes on spaCy's Lexeme object. The vocab command outputs a ready-to-use spaCy model with a Vocab containing the lexical data.

### First line
{"lang": "en", "settings": {"oov_prob": -20.502029418945312}}

### Entry structure
{
    "orth": string,     # the word text
    "id": int,          # can correspond to row in vectors table
    "lower": string,
    "norm": string,
    "shape": string
    "prefix": string,
    "suffix": string,
    "length": int,
    "cluster": string,
    "prob": float,
    "is_alpha": bool,
    "is_ascii": bool,
    "is_digit": bool,
    "is_lower": bool,
    "is_punct": bool,
    "is_space": bool,
    "is_title": bool,
    "is_upper": bool,
    "like_url": bool,
    "like_num": bool,
    "like_email": bool,
    "is_stop": bool,
    "is_oov": bool,
    "is_quote": bool,
    "is_left_punct": bool,
    "is_right_punct": bool
}

Here's an example of the 20 most frequent lexemes in the English training data:

https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/tree/master/examples/training/vocab-data.jsonl