---
title: What's New in v3.4
teaser: New features and how to upgrade
menu:
  - ['New Features', 'features']
  - ['Upgrading Notes', 'upgrading']
---

## New features {id="features",hidden="true"}

spaCy v3.4 brings typing and speed improvements along with new vectors for
English CNN pipelines and new trained pipelines for Croatian. This release also
includes prebuilt linux aarch64 wheels for all spaCy dependencies distributed by
Explosion.

### Typing improvements {id="typing"}

spaCy v3.4 supports pydantic v1.9 and mypy 0.950+ through extensive updates to
types in Thinc v8.1.

### Speed improvements {id="speed"}

- For the parser, use C `saxpy`/`sgemm` provided by the `Ops` implementation in
  order to use Accelerate through `thinc-apple-ops`.
- Improved speed of vector lookups.
- Improved speed for `Example.get_aligned_parse` and `Example.get_aligned`.

## Additional features and improvements

- Min/max `{n,m}` operator for `Matcher` patterns.
- Language updates:
  - Improve tokenization for Cyrillic combining diacritics.
  - Improve English tokenizer exceptions for contractions with
    this/that/these/those.
- Updated `spacy project clone` to try both `main` and `master` branches by
  default.
- Added confidence threshold for named entity linker.
- Improved handling of Typer optional default values for `init_config_cli`.
- Added cycle detection in parser projectivization methods.
- Added counts for NER labels in `debug data`.
- Support for adding NVTX ranges to `TrainablePipe` components.
- Support env variable `SPACY_NUM_BUILD_JOBS` to specify the number of build
  jobs to run in parallel with `pip`.

## Trained pipelines {id="pipelines"}

### New trained pipelines {id="new-pipelines"}

v3.4 introduces new CPU/CNN pipelines for Croatian, which use the trainable
lemmatizer and [floret vectors](https://github.com/explosion/floret). Due to the
use of [Bloom embeddings](https://explosion.ai/blog/bloom-embeddings) and
subwords, the pipelines have compact vectors with no out-of-vocabulary words.

| Package                                         | UPOS | Parser LAS | NER F |
| ----------------------------------------------- | ---: | ---------: | ----: |
| [`hr_core_news_sm`](/models/hr#hr_core_news_sm) | 96.6 |       77.5 |  76.1 |
| [`hr_core_news_md`](/models/hr#hr_core_news_md) | 97.3 |       80.1 |  81.8 |
| [`hr_core_news_lg`](/models/hr#hr_core_news_lg) | 97.5 |       80.4 |  83.0 |

### Pipeline updates {id="pipeline-updates"}

All CNN pipelines have been extended with whitespace augmentation.

The English CNN pipelines have new word vectors:

| Package                                       | Model Version |  TAG | Parser LAS | NER F |
| --------------------------------------------- | ------------- | ---: | ---------: | ----: |
| [`en_core_web_md`](/models/en#en_core_web_md) | v3.3.0        | 97.3 |       90.1 |  84.6 |
| [`en_core_web_md`](/models/en#en_core_web_md) | v3.4.0        | 97.2 |       90.3 |  85.5 |
| [`en_core_web_lg`](/models/en#en_core_web_lg) | v3.3.0        | 97.4 |       90.1 |  85.3 |
| [`en_core_web_lg`](/models/en#en_core_web_lg) | v3.4.0        | 97.3 |       90.2 |  85.6 |

## Notes about upgrading from v3.3 {id="upgrading"}

### Doc.has_vector

`Doc.has_vector` now matches `Token.has_vector` and `Span.has_vector`: it
returns `True` if at least one token in the doc has a vector rather than
checking only whether the vocab contains vectors.

### Using trained pipelines with floret vectors

If you're using a trained pipeline for Croatian, Finnish, Korean or Swedish with
new texts and working with `Doc` objects, you shouldn't notice any difference
between floret vectors and default vectors.

If you use vectors for similarity comparisons, there are a few differences,
mainly because a floret pipeline doesn't include any kind of frequency-based
word list similar to the list of in-vocabulary vector keys with default vectors.

- If your workflow iterates over the vector keys, you should use an external
  word list instead:

  ```diff
  - lexemes = [nlp.vocab[orth] for orth in nlp.vocab.vectors]
  + lexemes = [nlp.vocab[word] for word in external_word_list]
  ```

- `Vectors.most_similar` is not supported because there's no fixed list of
  vectors to compare your vectors to.

### Pipeline package version compatibility {id="version-compat"}

> #### Using legacy implementations
>
> In spaCy v3, you'll still be able to load and reference legacy implementations
> via [`spacy-legacy`](https://github.com/explosion/spacy-legacy), even if the
> components or architectures change and newer versions are available in the
> core library.

When you're loading a pipeline package trained with an earlier version of spaCy
v3, you will see a warning telling you that the pipeline may be incompatible.
This doesn't necessarily have to be true, but we recommend running your
pipelines against your test suite or evaluation data to make sure there are no
unexpected results.

If you're using one of the [trained pipelines](/models) we provide, you should
run [`spacy download`](/api/cli#download) to update to the latest version. To
see an overview of all installed packages and their compatibility, you can run
[`spacy validate`](/api/cli#validate).

If you've trained your own custom pipeline and you've confirmed that it's still
working as expected, you can update the spaCy version requirements in the
[`meta.json`](/api/data-formats#meta):

```diff
- "spacy_version": ">=3.3.0,<3.4.0",
+ "spacy_version": ">=3.3.0,<3.5.0",
```

### Updating v3.3 configs

To update a config from spaCy v3.3 with the new v3.4 settings, run
[`init fill-config`](/api/cli#init-fill-config):

```bash
$ python -m spacy init fill-config config-v3.3.cfg config-v3.4.cfg
```

In many cases ([`spacy train`](/api/cli#train),
[`spacy.load`](/api/top-level#spacy.load)), the new defaults will be filled in
automatically, but you'll need to fill in the new settings to run
[`debug config`](/api/cli#debug) and [`debug data`](/api/cli#debug-data).
