Our JSON training format is annoying to work with, and we've wanted to
retire it for some time. In the meantime, we can at least add some
missing functions to make it easier to live with.
This patch adds a function that generates the JSON format from a list
of Doc objects, one per paragraph. This should be a convenient way to handle
a lot of data conversions: whatever format you have the source
information in, you can use it to setup a Doc object. This approach
should offer better future-proofing as well. Hopefully, we can steadily
rewrite code that is sensitive to the current data-format, so that it
instead goes through this function. Then when we change the data format,
we won't have such a problem.
## Description
Related issues: #2379 (should be fixed by separating model tests)
* **total execution time down from > 300 seconds to under 60 seconds** 🎉
* removed all model-specific tests that could only really be run manually anyway – those will now live in a separate test suite in the [`spacy-models`](https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models) repository and are already integrated into our new model training infrastructure
* changed all relative imports to absolute imports to prepare for moving the test suite from `/spacy/tests` to `/tests` (it'll now always test against the installed version)
* merged old regression tests into collections, e.g. `test_issue1001-1500.py` (about 90% of the regression tests are very short anyways)
* tidied up and rewrote existing tests wherever possible
### Todo
- [ ] move tests to `/tests` and adjust CI commands accordingly
- [x] move model test suite from internal repo to `spacy-models`
- [x] ~~investigate why `pipeline/test_textcat.py` is flakey~~
- [x] review old regression tests (leftover files) and see if they can be merged, simplified or deleted
- [ ] update documentation on how to run tests
### Types of change
enhancement, tests
## Checklist
<!--- Before you submit the PR, go over this checklist and make sure you can
tick off all the boxes. [] -> [x] -->
- [x] I have submitted the spaCy Contributor Agreement.
- [x] I ran the tests, and all new and existing tests passed.
- [ ] My changes don't require a change to the documentation, or if they do, I've added all required information.