Spacy-cpp

Linux

Spacy-cpp is a C++ wrapper library for the excellent NLP library spaCy. This project is not affiliated with spaCy, but it is distributed under the same license (MIT).

The goal of spacy-cpp is to expose the functionality of spaCy to C++ applications, and to provide an API that is similar to that of spaCy, enabling rapid development in Python and simple porting to C++.

Spacy-cpp is under development and does not yet support all API's of spaCy, refer to the API Documentation section below.

Example Usage

Simple POS tagging example using spacy-cpp:

Spacy::Spacy spacy;
auto nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm");
auto doc = nlp.parse("This is a sentence.");
for (auto& token : doc.tokens())
    std::cout << token.text() << " [" << token.pos_() << "]\n";

For reference - doing the same using the spaCy API in Python:

import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
doc = nlp(u"This is a sentence.")
for token in doc:
    print token.text + " [" + token.pos_ + "]"

Supported Platforms

Spacy-cpp is implemented using C++11 with the intention of being portable. It's however only been tested on:

Linux / Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Pre-requisites

Spacy-cpp requires libpython, spaCy and typically a spaCy model.

Ubuntu

Install libpython 2.7:

sudo apt install libpython2.7-dev

Install spaCy and an English model:

pip install -U spacy
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

Installation

Spacy-cpp can be used either as a shared library or as a header-only library.

Shared Library

Build and install spacy-cpp:

mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake .. && make && sudo make install

Link library:

-lspacy

Include header (convenience header including all modules):

#include <spacy/spacy>

Header-only Library

Copy the src/spacy directory to the source directory of your project. Then define SPACY_HEADER_ONLY and include headers needed (spacy/spacy includes all headers):

#define SPACY_HEADER_ONLY
#include <spacy/spacy>

API Documentation

Spacy-cpp is under development and does not support the complete spaCy API yet.

Supported Classes

Supported Methods / Attributes

Attrs supports all attribute constants.

Doc supports the following methods / attributes:

count_by()
ents()
has_vector()
is_parsed()
is_tagged()
noun_chunks()
sentiment()
sents()
similarity()
text()
text_with_ws()
tokens()
vector_norm()

Nlp supports the following methods / attributes:

parse()
vocab()

Spacy supports the following methods / attributes:

load()
attrs()

Span supports the following methods / attributes:

doc()
label()
label_()
lemma_()
orth_()
root()
sentiment()
text()
text_with_ws()
tokens()
vector_norm()

StringStore supports the following methods / attributes:

add()

Token supports the following methods / attributes:

check_flag()
children()
cluster()
dep()
dep_()
ent_iob_()
has_vector()
i()
idx()
is_alpha()
is_ascii()
is_bracket()
is_digit()
is_left_punct()
is_lower()
is_oov()
is_punct()
is_quote()
is_right_punct()
is_space()
is_stop()
is_title()
is_upper()
lang()
lang_()
lemma()
lemma_()
like_email()
like_num()
like_url()
lower()
lower_()
nbor()
norm()
norm_()
orth()
orth_()
pos()
pos_()
prob()
rank()
sentiment()
shape()
shape_()
tag()
tag_()
text()
text_with_ws()
whitespace_()

Vocab supports the following methods / attributes:

strings()

Key Differences with spaCy

In spacy-cpp Nlp cannot be called as a method in order to perform parsing. Instead one need to use Nlp::parse().
In spacy-cpp Doc is not an iterable, instead one need to use Doc::token() to get a std::vector of the tokens in the Doc. Likewise for Span.
In spacy-cpp non-ASCII strings must be UTF-8 encoded in order to be correctly processed.

Technical Details

Spacy-cpp uses cmake for its tests. Commands to build and execute the test suite:

mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake .. && make && ctest --output-on-failure ; cd -

License

Spacy-cpp is distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE file.

Contributions

Bugs, PRs, etc are welcome on the GitHub project page https://github.com/d99kris/spacy-cpp

Keywords

c++, c++11, natural language processing, nlp, spacy.

cogmeta/spacy-cpp