spaCy/website/docs/usage/v3.md

title	teaser	menu
What's New in v3.0	New features, backwards incompatibilities and migration guide	Summary summary New Features features Backwards Incompatibilities incompat Migrating from v2.x migrating

Summary

New Features

New training workflow and config system

• Usage: Training models
• Thinc: Thinc's config system, Config
• CLI: train, pretrain, evaluate
• API: Config format, registry

Transformer-based pipelines

• Usage: Embeddings & Transformers, Training models
• API: Transformer, TransformerData, FullTransformerBatch
• **Architectures: ** TransformerModel, Tok2VecListener, Tok2VecTransformer
• Models: en_core_bert_sm
• Implementation: spacy-transformers

Custom models using any framework

Manage end-to-end workflows with projects

• Usage: spaCy projects, Training models
• CLI: project, train
• Templates: projects

New built-in pipeline components

Name	Description
SentenceRecognizer	Trainable component for sentence segmentation.
Morphologizer	Trainable component to predict morphological features.
Lemmatizer	Standalone component for rule-based and lookup lemmatization.
AttributeRuler	Component for setting token attributes using match patterns.
Transformer	Component for using transformer models in your pipeline, accessing outputs and aligning tokens. Provided via spacy-transformers.

• Usage: Processing pipelines
• API: Built-in pipeline components
• Implementation: spacy/pipeline

New and improved pipeline component APIs

• Language.factory, Language.component
• Language.analyze_pipes
• Adding components from other models

• Usage: Custom components, Defining components during training
• API: Language
• Implementation: spacy/language.py

Type hints and type-based data validation

Example

from spacy.language import Language
from pydantic import StrictBool

@Language.factory("my_component")
def create_my_component(
    nlp: Language,
    name: str,
    custom: StrictBool
):
   ...

spaCy v3.0 officially drops support for Python 2 and now requires Python 3.6+. This also means that the code base can take full advantage of type hints. spaCy's user-facing API that's implemented in pure Python (as opposed to Cython) now comes with type hints. The new version of spaCy's machine learning library Thinc also features extensive type support, including custom types for models and arrays, and a custom mypy plugin that can be used to type-check model definitions.

For data validation, spacy v3.0 adopts pydantic. It also powers the data validation of Thinc's config system, which lets you to register custom functions with typed arguments, reference them in your config and see validation errors if the argument values don't match.

• **Usage: ** Component type hints and validation, Training with custom code
• **Thinc: ** Type checking in Thinc, Thinc's config system

New methods, attributes and commands

The following methods, attributes and commands are new in spaCy v3.0.

Name	Description
Token.lex	Access a token's Lexeme.
Language.select_pipes	Contextmanager for enabling or disabling specific pipeline components for a block.
Language.analyze_pipes	Analyze components and their interdependencies.
Language.resume_training	Experimental: continue training a pretrained model and initialize "rehearsal" for components that implement a rehearse method to prevent catastrophic forgetting.
@Language.factory @Language.component	Decorators for registering pipeline component factories and simple stateless component functions.
Language.has_factory	Check whether a component factory is registered on a language class.s
Language.get_factory_meta Language.get_pipe_meta	Get the FactoryMeta with component metadata for a factory or instance name.
Language.config	The config used to create the current nlp object. An instance of Config and can be saved to disk and used for training.
Pipe.score	Method on trainable pipeline components that returns a dictionary of evaluation scores.
registry	Function registry to map functions to string names that can be referenced in configs.
init config init fill-config debug config	CLI commands for initializing, auto-filling and debugging training configs.
project	Suite of CLI commands for cloning, running and managing spaCy projects.

Backwards Incompatibilities

As always, we've tried to keep the breaking changes to a minimum and focus on changes that were necessary to support the new features, fix problems or improve usability. The following section lists the relevant changes to the user-facing API. For specific examples of how to rewrite your code, check out the migration guide.

Note that spaCy v3.0 now requires Python 3.6+.

API changes

• Model symlinks, the link command and shortcut names are now deprecated. There can be many different models and not just one "English model", so you should always use the full model name like en_core_web_sm explicitly.
• The train and pretrain commands now only take a config.cfg file containing the full training config.
• Language.add_pipe now takes the string name of the component factory instead of the component function.
• Custom pipeline components now needs to be decorated with the @Language.component or @Language.factory decorator.
• Language.update now takes a batch of Example objects instead of raw texts and annotations, or Doc and GoldParse objects.
• The Language.disable_pipes contextmanager has been replaced by Language.select_pipes, which can explicitly disable or enable components.
• The Language.update, Language.evaluate and Pipe.update methods now all take batches of Example objects instead of Doc and GoldParse objects, or raw text and a dictionary of annotations. Language.begin_training and Pipe.begin_training now take a function that returns a sequence of Example objects to initialize the model instead of a list of tuples.
• Matcher.add, PhraseMatcher.add and DependencyMatcher.add now only accept a list of patterns as the second argument (instead of a variable number of arguments). The on_match callback becomes an optional keyword argument.

Removed or renamed API

Removed	Replacement
Language.disable_pipes	Language.select_pipes
GoldParse	Example
GoldCorpus	Corpus
spacy debug-data	spacy debug data
spacy profile	spacy debug profile
spacy link, util.set_data_path, util.get_data_path	not needed, model symlinks are deprecated

The following deprecated methods, attributes and arguments were removed in v3.0. Most of them have been deprecated for a while and many would previously raise errors. Many of them were also mostly internals. If you've been working with more recent versions of spaCy v2.x, it's unlikely that your code relied on them.

Removed	Replacement
Doc.tokens_from_list	Doc.__init__
Doc.merge, Span.merge	Doc.retokenize
Token.string, Span.string, Span.upper, Span.lower	Span.text, Token.text
Language.tagger, Language.parser, Language.entity	Language.get_pipe
keyword-arguments like vocab=False on to_disk, from_disk, to_bytes, from_bytes	exclude=["vocab"]
n_threads argument on Tokenizer, Matcher, PhraseMatcher	n_process
verbose argument on [Language.evaluate]	logging
SentenceSegmenter hook, SimilarityHook	user hooks, Sentencizer, SentenceRecognizer

Migrating from v2.x

Downloading and loading models

Model symlinks and shortcuts like en are now officially deprecated. There are many different models with different capabilities and not just one "English model". In order to download and load a model, you should always use its full name – for instance, en_core_web_sm.

- python -m spacy download en
+ python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

- nlp = spacy.load("en")
+ nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")

Custom pipeline components and factories

Custom pipeline components now have to be registered explicitly using the @Language.component or @Language.factory decorator. For simple functions that take a Doc and return it, all you have to do is add the @Language.component decorator to it and assign it a name:

### Stateless function components
+ from spacy.language import Language

+ @Language.component("my_component")
def my_component(doc):
    return doc

For class components that are initialized with settings and/or the shared nlp object, you can use the @Language.factory decorator. Also make sure that that the method used to initialize the factory has two named arguments: nlp (the current nlp object) and name (the string name of the component instance).

### Stateful class components
+ from spacy.language import Language

+ @Language.factory("my_component")
class MyComponent:
-   def __init__(self, nlp):
+   def __init__(self, nlp, name):
        self.nlp = nlp

    def __call__(self, doc):
        return doc

Instead of decorating your class, you could also add a factory function that takes the arguments nlp and name and returns an instance of your component:

### Stateful class components with factory function
+ from spacy.language import Language

+ @Language.factory("my_component")
+ def create_my_component(nlp, name):
+     return MyComponent(nlp)

class MyComponent:
    def __init__(self, nlp):
        self.nlp = nlp

    def __call__(self, doc):
        return doc

The @Language.component and @Language.factory decorators now take care of adding an entry to the component factories, so spaCy knows how to load a component back in from its string name. You won't have to write to Language.factories manually anymore.

- Language.factories["my_component"] = lambda nlp, **cfg: MyComponent(nlp)

Adding components to the pipeline

The nlp.add_pipe method now takes the string name of the component factory instead of a callable component. This allows spaCy to track and serialize components that have been added and their settings.

+ @Language.component("my_component")
def my_component(doc):
    return doc

- nlp.add_pipe(my_component)
+ nlp.add_pipe("my_component")

nlp.add_pipe now also returns the pipeline component itself, so you can access its attributes. The nlp.create_pipe method is now mostly internals and you typically shouldn't have to use it in your code.

- parser = nlp.create_pipe("parser")
- nlp.add_pipe(parser)
+ parser = nlp.add_pipe("parser")

If you need to add a component from an existing pretrained model, you can now use the source argument on nlp.add_pipe. This will check that the component is compatible, and take care of porting over all config. During training, you can also reference existing pretrained components in your config and decide whether or not they should be updated with more data.

config.cfg (excerpt)

[components.ner]
source = "en_core_web_sm"
component = "ner"

source_nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
nlp = spacy.blank("en")
- ner = source_nlp.get_pipe("ner")
- nlp.add_pipe(ner)
+ nlp.add_pipe("ner", source=source_nlp)

Adding match patterns

The Matcher.add, PhraseMatcher.add and DependencyMatcher.add methods now only accept a list of patterns as the second argument (instead of a variable number of arguments). The on_match callback becomes an optional keyword argument.

matcher = Matcher(nlp.vocab)
patterns = [[{"TEXT": "Google"}, {"TEXT": "Now"}], [{"TEXT": "GoogleNow"}]]
- matcher.add("GoogleNow", on_match, *patterns)
+ matcher.add("GoogleNow", patterns, on_match=on_match)

matcher = PhraseMatcher(nlp.vocab)
patterns = [nlp("health care reform"), nlp("healthcare reform")]
- matcher.add("HEALTH", on_match, *patterns)
+ matcher.add("HEALTH", patterns, on_match=on_match)

Training models

To train your models, you should now pretty much always use the spacy train CLI. You shouldn't have to put together your own training scripts anymore, unless you really want to. The training commands now use a flexible config file that describes all training settings and hyperparameters, as well as your pipeline, model components and architectures to use. The --code argument lets you pass in code containing custom registered functions that you can reference in your config. To get started, check out the quickstart widget.

Binary .spacy training data format

spaCy v3.0 uses a new binary training data format created by serializing a DocBin, which represents a collection of Doc objects. This means that you can train spaCy models using the same format it outputs: annotated Doc objects. The binary format is extremely efficient in storage, especially when packing multiple documents together.

You can convert your existing JSON-formatted data using the spacy convert command, which outputs .spacy files:

$ python -m spacy convert ./training.json ./output

Training config

The easiest way to get started with a training config is to use the init config command or the quickstart widget. You can define your requirements, and it will auto-generate a starter config with the best-matching default settings.

$ python -m spacy init config ./config.cfg --lang en --pipeline tagger,parser

If you've exported a starter config from our quickstart widget, you can use the init fill-config to fill it with all default values. You can then use the auto-generated config.cfg for training:

### {wrap="true"}
- python -m spacy train en ./output ./train.json ./dev.json --pipeline tagger,parser --cnn-window 1 --bilstm-depth 0
+ python -m spacy train ./config.cfg --output ./output

The easiest way to get started with an end-to-end training process is to clone a project template. Projects let you manage multi-step workflows, from data preprocessing to training and packaging your model.

Training via the Python API

For most use cases, you shouldn't have to write your own training scripts anymore. Instead, you can use spacy train with a config file and custom registered functions if needed. You can even register callbacks that can modify the nlp object at different stages of its lifecycle to fully customize it before training.

If you do decide to use the internal training API from Python, you should only need a few small modifications to convert your scripts from spaCy v2.x to v3.x. The Example.from_dict classmethod takes a reference Doc and a dictionary of annotations, similar to the "simple training style" in spaCy v2.x:

### Migrating Doc and GoldParse
doc = nlp.make_doc("Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook")
entities = [(0, 15, "PERSON"), (30, 38, "ORG")]
- gold = GoldParse(doc, entities=entities)
+ example = Example.from_dict(doc, {"entities": entities})

### Migrating simple training style
text = "Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook"
annotations = {"entities": [(0, 15, "PERSON"), (30, 38, "ORG")]}
+ doc = nlp.make_doc(text)
+ example = Example.from_dict(doc, annotations)

The Language.update, Language.evaluate and Pipe.update methods now all take batches of Example objects instead of Doc and GoldParse objects, or raw text and a dictionary of annotations.

### Training loop {highlight="11"}
TRAIN_DATA = [
    ("Who is Shaka Khan?", {"entities": [(7, 17, "PERSON")]}),
    ("I like London.", {"entities": [(7, 13, "LOC")]}),
]
nlp.begin_training()
for i in range(20):
    random.shuffle(TRAIN_DATA)
    for batch in minibatch(TRAIN_DATA):
        examples = []
        for text, annots in batch:
            examples.append(Example.from_dict(nlp.make_doc(text), annots))
        nlp.update(examples)

Language.begin_training and Pipe.begin_training now take a function that returns a sequence of Example objects to initialize the model instead of a list of tuples. The data examples are used to initialize the models of trainable pipeline components, which includes validating the network, inferring missing shapes and setting up the label scheme.

- nlp.begin_training(examples)
+ nlp.begin_training(lambda: examples)

Packaging models

The spacy package command now automatically builds the installable .tar.gz sdist of the Python package, so you don't have to run this step manually anymore. You can disable the behavior by setting the --no-sdist flag.

python -m spacy package ./model ./packages
- cd /output/en_model-0.0.0
- python setup.py sdist

Migration notes for plugin maintainers

Thanks to everyone who's been contributing to the spaCy ecosystem by developing and maintaining one of the many awesome plugins and extensions. We've tried to make it as easy as possible for you to upgrade your packages for spaCy v3. The most common use case for plugins is providing pipeline components and extension attributes. When migrating your plugin, double-check the following:

• Use the @Language.factory decorator to register your component and assign it a name. This allows users to refer to your components by name and serialize pipelines referencing them. Remove all manual entries to the Language.factories.
• Make sure your component factories take at least two named arguments: nlp (the current nlp object) and name (the instance name of the added component so you can identify multiple instances of the same component).
• Update all references to nlp.add_pipe in your docs to use string names instead of the component functions.

### {highlight="1-5"}
from spacy.language import Language

@Language.factory("my_component", default_config={"some_setting": False})
def create_component(nlp: Language, name: str, some_setting: bool):
    return MyCoolComponent(some_setting=some_setting)


class MyCoolComponent:
    def __init__(self, some_setting):
        self.some_setting = some_setting

    def __call__(self, doc):
        # Do something to the doc
        return doc

Result in config.cfg

[components.my_component]
factory = "my_component"
some_setting = true

import spacy
from your_plugin import MyCoolComponent

nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
- component = MyCoolComponent(some_setting=True)
- nlp.add_pipe(component)
+ nlp.add_pipe("my_component", config={"some_setting": True})

The @Language.factory decorator takes care of letting spaCy know that a component of that name is available. This means that your users can add it to the pipeline using its string name. However, this requires the decorator to be executed – so users will still have to import your plugin. Alternatively, your plugin could expose an entry point, which spaCy can read from. This means that spaCy knows how to initialize my_component, even if your package isn't imported.