Infrastructure/software/spacy

Background

The SpaCy library supports a range of ‘basic’ NLP tasks, including sentence splitting, tokenization, tagging and lemmatization, and dependency parsing—for about half a dozen European languages. SpaCy is somewhat similar on the surface to the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) but prides itself of both higher-quality analysis and better computational efficiency.

Usage

The module nlpl-nltk provides a SpaCy installation in a Python 3.5 virtual environment.

module use -a /proj*/nlpl/software/modulefiles
module load nlpl-nltk

This installation (just as other NLPL-maintained Python virtual environments) can be combined with other Python-based modules, for example the NLPL installations of PyTorch or TensorFlow. To ‘stack’ multiple Python environments, they can simply be loaded together, e.g.

module load nlpl-nltk nlpl-tensorflow

Because PyTorch and TensorFlow are ‘special’ in their requirements for dynamic libraries and support for both cpu and gpu nodes, it is important for them to be activated last, i.e. on the ‘top’ of a multi-module stack.

Versions

As of October 2018, version 2.0.12 is installed.

Installation

After a ‘standard’ NLPL virtual environment and module definition have been created:

module load nlpl-spacy
pip install spacy
for i in en de es pt fr it nl xx; do python -m spacy download $i; done