//- 💫 DOCS > USAGE > SPACY 101 include ../_includes/_mixins p | Whether you're new to spaCy, or just want to brush up on some | NLP basics and implementation details – this page should have you covered. | Each section will explain one of spaCy's features in simple terms and | with examples or illustrations. Some sections will also reappear across | the usage guides as a quick introduction. +aside("Help us improve the docs") | Did you spot a mistake or come across explanations that | are unclear? We always appreciate improvement | #[+a(gh("spaCy") + "/issues") suggestions] or | #[+a(gh("spaCy") + "/pulls") pull requests]. You can find a "Suggest | edits" link at the bottom of each page that points you to the source. +h(2, "whats-spacy") What's spaCy? +grid.o-no-block +grid-col("half") p | spaCy is a #[strong free, open-source library] for advanced | #[strong Natural Language Processing] (NLP) in Python. p | If you're working with a lot of text, you'll eventually want to | know more about it. For example, what's it about? What do the | words mean in context? Who is doing what to whom? What companies | and products are mentioned? Which texts are similar to each other? p | spaCy is designed specifically for #[strong production use] and | helps you build applications that process and "understand" | large volumes of text. It can be used to build | #[strong information extraction] or | #[strong natural language understanding] systems, or to | pre-process text for #[strong deep learning]. +table-of-contents +item #[+a("#features") Features] +item #[+a("#annotations") Linguistic annotations] +item #[+a("#annotations-token") Tokenization] +item #[+a("#annotations-pos-deps") POS tags and dependencies] +item #[+a("#annotations-ner") Named entities] +item #[+a("#vectors-similarity") Word vectors and similarity] +item #[+a("#pipelines") Pipelines] +item #[+a("#vocab") Vocab, hashes and lexemes] +item #[+a("#serialization") Serialization] +item #[+a("#training") Training] +item #[+a("#language-data") Language data] +item #[+a("#lightning-tour") Lightning tour] +item #[+a("#architecture") Architecture] +item #[+a("#community") Community & FAQ] +h(3, "what-spacy-isnt") What spaCy isn't +list +item #[strong spaCy is not a platform or "an API"]. | Unlike a platform, spaCy does not provide a software as a service, or | a web application. It's an open-source library designed to help you | build NLP applications, not a consumable service. +item #[strong spaCy is not an out-of-the-box chat bot engine]. | While spaCy can be used to power conversational applications, it's | not designed specifically for chat bots, and only provides the | underlying text processing capabilities. +item #[strong spaCy is not research software]. | It's built on the latest research, but it's designed to get | things done. This leads to fairly different design decisions than | #[+a("https://github./nltk/nltk") NLTK] | or #[+a("https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/") CoreNLP], which were | created as platforms for teaching and research. The main difference | is that spaCy is integrated and opinionated. spaCy tries to avoid asking | the user to choose between multiple algorithms that deliver equivalent | functionality. Keeping the menu small lets spaCy deliver generally better | performance and developer experience. +item #[strong spaCy is not a company]. | It's an open-source library. Our company publishing spaCy and other | software is called #[+a(COMPANY_URL, true) Explosion AI]. +section("features") +h(2, "features") Features p | In the documentation, you'll come across mentions of spaCy's | features and capabilities. Some of them refer to linguistic concepts, | while others are related to more general machine learning | functionality. +table(["Name", "Description"]) +row +cell #[strong Tokenization] +cell Segmenting text into words, punctuations marks etc. +row +cell #[strong Part-of-speech] (POS) #[strong Tagging] +cell Assigning word types to tokens, like verb or noun. +row +cell #[strong Dependency Parsing] +cell | Assigning syntactic dependency labels, describing the | relations between individual tokens, like subject or object. +row +cell #[strong Lemmatization] +cell | Assigning the base forms of words. For example, the lemma of | "was" is "be", and the lemma of "rats" is "rat". +row +cell #[strong Sentence Boundary Detection] (SBD) +cell Finding and segmenting individual sentences. +row +cell #[strong Named Entity Recognition] (NER) +cell | Labelling named "real-world" objects, like persons, companies | or locations. +row +cell #[strong Similarity] +cell | Comparing words, text spans and documents and how similar | they are to each other. +row +cell #[strong Text Classification] +cell | Assigning categories or labels to a whole document, or parts | of a document. +row +cell #[strong Rule-based Matching] +cell | Finding sequences of tokens based on their texts and | linguistic annotations, similar to regular expressions. +row +cell #[strong Training] +cell Updating and improving a statistical model's predictions. +row +cell #[strong Serialization] +cell Saving objects to files or byte strings. +h(3, "statistical-models") Statistical models p | While some of spaCy's features work independently, others require | #[+a("/models") statistical models] to be loaded, which enable spaCy | to #[strong predict] linguistic annotations – for example, | whether a word is a verb or a noun. spaCy currently offers statistical | models for #[strong #{MODEL_LANG_COUNT} languages], which can be | installed as individual Python modules. Models can differ in size, | speed, memory usage, accuracy and the data they include. The model | you choose always depends on your use case and the texts you're | working with. For a general-purpose use case, the small, default | models are always a good start. They typically include the following | components: +list +item | #[strong Binary weights] for the part-of-speech tagger, | dependency parser and named entity recognizer to predict those | annotations in context. +item | #[strong Lexical entries] in the vocabulary, i.e. words and their | context-independent attributes like the shape or spelling. +item | #[strong Word vectors], i.e. multi-dimensional meaning | representations of words that let you determine how similar they | are to each other. +item | #[strong Configuration] options, like the language and | processing pipeline settings, to put spaCy in the correct state | when you load in the model. +h(2, "annotations") Linguistic annotations p | spaCy provides a variety of linguistic annotations to give you | #[strong insights into a text's grammatical structure]. This | includes the word types, like the parts of speech, and how the words | are related to each other. For example, if you're analysing text, it | makes a huge difference whether a noun is the subject of a sentence, | or the object – or whether "google" is used as a verb, or refers to | the website or company in a specific context. +aside-code("Loading models", "bash", "$"). python -m spacy download en >>> import spacy >>> nlp = spacy.load('en') p | Once you've #[+a("/usage/models") downloaded and installed] a model, | you can load it via #[+api("spacy#load") #[code spacy.load()]]. This will | return a #[code Language] object contaning all components and data needed | to process text. We usually call it #[code nlp]. Calling the #[code nlp] | object on a string of text will return a processed #[code Doc]: +code. import spacy nlp = spacy.load('en') doc = nlp(u'Apple is looking at buying U.K. startup for $1 billion') p | Even though a #[code Doc] is processed – e.g. split into individual words | and annotated – it still holds #[strong all information of the original text], | like whitespace characters. You can always get the offset of a token into the | original string, or reconstruct the original by joining the tokens and their | trailing whitespace. This way, you'll never lose any information | when processing text with spaCy. +h(3, "annotations-token") Tokenization include _spacy-101/_tokenization +infobox | To learn more about how spaCy's tokenization rules work in detail, | how to #[strong customise and replace] the default tokenizer and how to | #[strong add language-specific data], see the usage guides on | #[+a("/usage/adding-languages") adding languages] and | #[+a("/usage/linguistic-features#tokenization") customising the tokenizer]. +h(3, "annotations-pos-deps") Part-of-speech tags and dependencies +tag-model("dependency parse") include _spacy-101/_pos-deps +infobox | To learn more about #[strong part-of-speech tagging] and rule-based | morphology, and how to #[strong navigate and use the parse tree] | effectively, see the usage guides on | #[+a("/usage/linguistic-features#pos-tagging") part-of-speech tagging] and | #[+a("/usage/linguistic-features#dependency-parse") using the dependency parse]. +h(3, "annotations-ner") Named Entities +tag-model("named entities") include _spacy-101/_named-entities +infobox | To learn more about entity recognition in spaCy, how to | #[strong add your own entities] to a document and how to | #[strong train and update] the entity predictions of a model, see the | usage guides on | #[+a("/usage/linguistic-features#named-entities") named entity recognition] and | #[+a("/usage/training#ner") training the named entity recognizer]. +h(2, "vectors-similarity") Word vectors and similarity +tag-model("vectors") include _spacy-101/_similarity include _spacy-101/_word-vectors +infobox | To learn more about word vectors, how to #[strong customise them] and | how to load #[strong your own vectors] into spaCy, see the usage | guide on | #[+a("/usage/vectors-similarity") using word vectors and semantic similarities]. +h(2, "pipelines") Pipelines include _spacy-101/_pipelines +infobox | To learn more about #[strong how processing pipelines work] in detail, | how to enable and disable their components, and how to | #[strong create your own], see the usage guide on | #[+a("/usage/processing-pipelines") language processing pipelines]. +h(2, "vocab") Vocab, hashes and lexemes include _spacy-101/_vocab +h(2, "serialization") Serialization include _spacy-101/_serialization +infobox | To learn more about how to #[strong save and load your own models], | see the usage guide on | #[+a("/usage/training#saving-loading") saving and loading]. +h(2, "training") Training include _spacy-101/_training +infobox | To learn more about #[strong training and updating] models, how to create | training data and how to improve spaCy's named entity recognition models, | see the usage guides on #[+a("/usage/training") training]. +h(2, "language-data") Language data include _spacy-101/_language-data +infobox | To learn more about the individual components of the language data and | how to #[strong add a new language] to spaCy in preparation for training | a language model, see the usage guide on | #[+a("/usage/adding-languages") adding languages]. +section("lightning-tour") +h(2, "lightning-tour") Lightning tour include _spacy-101/_lightning-tour +section("architecture") +h(2, "architecture") Architecture include _spacy-101/_architecture +section("community-faq") +h(2, "community") Community & FAQ include _spacy-101/_community-faq