spaCy/website/docs/usage/facts-figures.md
2020-10-15 17:27:24 +02:00

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---
title: Facts & Figures
teaser: The hard numbers for spaCy and how it compares to other tools
next: /usage/spacy-101
menu:
- ['Feature Comparison', 'comparison']
- ['Benchmarks', 'benchmarks']
# TODO: - ['Citing spaCy', 'citation']
---
## Comparison {#comparison hidden="true"}
spaCy is a **free, open-source library** for advanced **Natural Language
Processing** (NLP) in Python. It's designed specifically for **production use**
and helps you build applications that process and "understand" large volumes of
text. It can be used to build information extraction or natural language
understanding systems.
### Feature overview {#comparison-features}
import Features from 'widgets/features.js'
<Features />
### When should I use spaCy? {#comparison-usage}
-**I'm a beginner and just getting started with NLP.** spaCy makes it easy
to get started and comes with extensive documentation, including a
beginner-friendly [101 guide](/usage/spacy-101), a free interactive
[online course](https://course.spacy.io) and a range of
[video tutorials](https://www.youtube.com/c/ExplosionAI).
-**I want to build an end-to-end production application.** spaCy is
specifically designed for production use and lets you build and train powerful
NLP pipelines and package them for easy deployment.
-**I want my application to be efficient on GPU _and_ CPU.** While spaCy
lets you train modern NLP models that are best run on GPU, it also offers
CPU-optimized pipelines, which are less accurate but much cheaper to run.
-**I want to try out different neural network architectures for NLP.**
spaCy lets you customize and swap out the model architectures powering its
components, and implement your own using a framework like PyTorch or
TensorFlow. The declarative configuration system makes it easy to mix and
match functions and keep track of your hyperparameters to make sure your
experiments are reproducible.
-**I want to build a language generation application.** spaCy's focus is
natural language _processing_ and extracting information from large volumes of
text. While you can use it to help you re-write existing text, it doesn't
include any specific functionality for language generation tasks.
-**I want to research machine learning algorithms.** spaCy is built on the
latest research, but it's not a research library. If your goal is to write
papers and run benchmarks, spaCy is probably not a good choice. However, you
can use it to make the results of your research easily available for others to
use, e.g. via a custom spaCy component.
## Benchmarks {#benchmarks}
spaCy v3.0 introduces transformer-based pipelines that bring spaCy's accuracy
right up to **current state-of-the-art**. You can also use a CPU-optimized
pipeline, which is less accurate but much cheaper to run.
<!-- TODO: update benchmarks and intro -->
> #### Evaluation details
>
> - **OntoNotes 5.0:** spaCy's English models are trained on this corpus, as
> it's several times larger than other English treebanks. However, most
> systems do not report accuracies on it.
> - **Penn Treebank:** The "classic" parsing evaluation for research. However,
> it's quite far removed from actual usage: it uses sentences with
> gold-standard segmentation and tokenization, from a pretty specific type of
> text (articles from a single newspaper, 1984-1989).
import Benchmarks from 'usage/\_benchmarks-models.md'
<Benchmarks />
<figure>
| Dependency Parsing System | UAS | LAS |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ---: | ---: |
| spaCy RoBERTa (2020) | 95.5 | 94.3 |
| [Mrini et al.](https://khalilmrini.github.io/Label_Attention_Layer.pdf) (2019) | 97.4 | 96.3 |
| [Zhou and Zhao](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1230/) (2019) | 97.2 | 95.7 |
<figcaption class="caption">
**Dependency parsing accuracy** on the Penn Treebank. See
[NLP-progress](http://nlpprogress.com/english/dependency_parsing.html) for more
results. Project template:
[`benchmarks/parsing_penn_treebank`](%%GITHUB_PROJECTS/benchmarks/parsing_penn_treebank).
</figcaption>
</figure>
<!-- TODO: ## Citing spaCy {#citation}
-->