spacy 1.8.0

v1.8.0: Better NER training, saving and loading

on Python PyPI

We've been delighted to see spaCy growing so much over the last few months. Before the v1.0 release, we asked for your feedback, which has been incredibly helpful in improving the library. As we're getting closer to v2.0 we hope you'll take a few minutes to fill out the survey, to help us understand how you're using the library, and how it can be better.

📊 Take the survey!

✨ Major features and improvements

• NEW: Add experimental Language.save_to_directory() method to make it easier to save user-trained models.
• Add spacy.compat module to handle platform and Python version compatibility.
• Update package command to read from existing meta.json and supply custom location to meta file.
• Fix various compatibility issues and improve error messages in spacy.cli.

🔴 Bug fixes

• Fix issue #701, #822, #937, #959: Updated docs for NER training and saving/loading.
• Fix issue #968: spacy.load() now prints warning if no model is found.
• Fix issue #970, #978: Use correct unicode paths for symlinks on Python 2 / Windows.
• Fix issue #973: Make token.lemma and token.lemma_ attributes writeable.
• Fix issue #983: Add spacy.compat to handle compatibility.

📖 Documentation and examples

• NEW: Example for training a new entity type.
• NEW: Workflow for training the Named Entity Recognizer.
• NEW: Workflow for saving and loading models.
• Update Contributing Guidelines with code conventions for Python and Cython.
• Fix various typos and inconsistencies.

👥 Contributors

Thanks to @tsohil and @oroszgy for the pull requests!