spaCy/website/docs/api/tokenizer.md

title	teaser	tag	source
Tokenizer	Segment text into words, punctuations marks, etc.	class	spacy/tokenizer.pyx

Default config

[nlp.tokenizer]
@tokenizers = "spacy.Tokenizer.v1"

Segment text, and create Doc objects with the discovered segment boundaries. For a deeper understanding, see the docs on how spaCy's tokenizer works. The tokenizer is typically created automatically when a Language subclass is initialized and it reads its settings like punctuation and special case rules from the Language.Defaults provided by the language subclass.

Tokenizer.__init__

Create a Tokenizer to create Doc objects given unicode text. For examples of how to construct a custom tokenizer with different tokenization rules, see the usage documentation.

Example

# Construction 1
from spacy.tokenizer import Tokenizer
from spacy.lang.en import English
nlp = English()
# Create a blank Tokenizer with just the English vocab
tokenizer = Tokenizer(nlp.vocab)

# Construction 2
from spacy.lang.en import English
nlp = English()
# Create a Tokenizer with the default settings for English
# including punctuation rules and exceptions
tokenizer = nlp.tokenizer

Name	Description
vocab	A storage container for lexical types. Vocab
rules	Exceptions and special-cases for the tokenizer. Optional[Dict[str, List[Dict[int, str]]]]
prefix_search	A function matching the signature of re.compile(string).search to match prefixes. Optional[Callablestr], Optional[Match]
suffix_search	A function matching the signature of re.compile(string).search to match suffixes. Optional[Callablestr], Optional[Match]
infix_finditer	A function matching the signature of re.compile(string).finditer to find infixes. Optional[Callablestr], Iterator[Match]
token_match	A function matching the signature of re.compile(string).match to find token matches. Optional[Callablestr], Optional[Match]
url_match	A function matching the signature of re.compile(string).match to find token matches after considering prefixes and suffixes. Optional[Callablestr], Optional[Match]

Tokenizer.__call__

Tokenize a string.

Example

tokens = tokenizer("This is a sentence")
assert len(tokens) == 4

Name	Description
string	The string to tokenize. str
RETURNS	A container for linguistic annotations. Doc

Tokenizer.pipe

Tokenize a stream of texts.

Example

texts = ["One document.", "...", "Lots of documents"]
for doc in tokenizer.pipe(texts, batch_size=50):
    pass

Name	Description
texts	A sequence of unicode texts. Iterable[str]
batch_size	The number of texts to accumulate in an internal buffer. Defaults to 1000. int
YIELDS	The tokenized Doc objects, in order. Doc

Tokenizer.find_infix

Find internal split points of the string.

Name	Description
string	The string to split. str
RETURNS	A list of re.MatchObject objects that have .start() and .end() methods, denoting the placement of internal segment separators, e.g. hyphens. List[Match]

Tokenizer.find_prefix

Find the length of a prefix that should be segmented from the string, or None if no prefix rules match.

Name	Description
string	The string to segment. str
RETURNS	The length of the prefix if present, otherwise None. Optional[int]

Tokenizer.find_suffix

Find the length of a suffix that should be segmented from the string, or None if no suffix rules match.

Name	Description
string	The string to segment. str
RETURNS	The length of the suffix if present, otherwise None. Optional[int]

Tokenizer.add_special_case

Add a special-case tokenization rule. This mechanism is also used to add custom tokenizer exceptions to the language data. See the usage guide on adding languages and linguistic features for more details and examples.

Example

from spacy.attrs import ORTH, NORM
case = [{ORTH: "do"}, {ORTH: "n't", NORM: "not"}]
tokenizer.add_special_case("don't", case)

Name	Description
string	The string to specially tokenize. str
token_attrs	A sequence of dicts, where each dict describes a token and its attributes. The ORTH fields of the attributes must exactly match the string when they are concatenated. Iterable[Dict[int, str]]

Tokenizer.explain

Tokenize a string with a slow debugging tokenizer that provides information about which tokenizer rule or pattern was matched for each token. The tokens produced are identical to Tokenizer.__call__ except for whitespace tokens.

Example

tok_exp = nlp.tokenizer.explain("(don't)")
assert [t[0] for t in tok_exp] == ["PREFIX", "SPECIAL-1", "SPECIAL-2", "SUFFIX"]
assert [t[1] for t in tok_exp] == ["(", "do", "n't", ")"]

Name	Description
string	The string to tokenize with the debugging tokenizer. str
RETURNS	A list of (pattern_string, token_string) tuples. List[Tuple[str, str]]

Tokenizer.to_disk

Serialize the tokenizer to disk.

Example

tokenizer = Tokenizer(nlp.vocab)
tokenizer.to_disk("/path/to/tokenizer")

Name	Description
path	A path to a directory, which will be created if it doesn't exist. Paths may be either strings or Path-like objects. Union[str, Path]
keyword-only
exclude	String names of serialization fields to exclude. Iterable[str]

Tokenizer.from_disk

Load the tokenizer from disk. Modifies the object in place and returns it.

Example

tokenizer = Tokenizer(nlp.vocab)
tokenizer.from_disk("/path/to/tokenizer")

Name	Description
path	A path to a directory. Paths may be either strings or Path-like objects. Union[str, Path]
keyword-only
exclude	String names of serialization fields to exclude. Iterable[str]
RETURNS	The modified Tokenizer object. Tokenizer

Tokenizer.to_bytes

Example

tokenizer = tokenizer(nlp.vocab)
tokenizer_bytes = tokenizer.to_bytes()

Serialize the tokenizer to a bytestring.

Name	Description
keyword-only
exclude	String names of serialization fields to exclude. Iterable[str]
RETURNS	The serialized form of the Tokenizer object. bytes

Tokenizer.from_bytes

Load the tokenizer from a bytestring. Modifies the object in place and returns it.

Example

tokenizer_bytes = tokenizer.to_bytes()
tokenizer = Tokenizer(nlp.vocab)
tokenizer.from_bytes(tokenizer_bytes)

Name	Description
bytes_data	The data to load from. bytes
keyword-only
exclude	String names of serialization fields to exclude. Iterable[str]
RETURNS	The Tokenizer object. Tokenizer

Attributes

Name	Description
vocab	The vocab object of the parent Doc. Vocab
prefix_search	A function to find segment boundaries from the start of a string. Returns the length of the segment, or None. Optional[Callablestr], Optional[Match]
suffix_search	A function to find segment boundaries from the end of a string. Returns the length of the segment, or None. Optional[Callablestr], Optional[Match]
infix_finditer	A function to find internal segment separators, e.g. hyphens. Returns a (possibly empty) sequence of re.MatchObject objects. Optional[Callablestr], Iterator[Match]
token_match	A function matching the signature of re.compile(string).match to find token matches. Returns an re.MatchObject or None. Optional[Callablestr], Optional[Match]
rules	A dictionary of tokenizer exceptions and special cases. Optional[Dict[str, List[Dict[int, str]]]]

Serialization fields

During serialization, spaCy will export several data fields used to restore different aspects of the object. If needed, you can exclude them from serialization by passing in the string names via the exclude argument.

Example

data = tokenizer.to_bytes(exclude=["vocab", "exceptions"])
tokenizer.from_disk("./data", exclude=["token_match"])

Name	Description
vocab	The shared Vocab.
prefix_search	The prefix rules.
suffix_search	The suffix rules.
infix_finditer	The infix rules.
token_match	The token match expression.
exceptions	The tokenizer exception rules.