What is nlp in spacy?

Andrew Anderson 0
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Usually we start from:

nlp = spacy.load('en_encore_web_sm') # or medium, or large

or

nlp = English()

then:

doc = nlp('my text')

Then we can do a lot of fun with that even not knowing the nature of the first line.

But what exactly is 'nlp'? What is going on under the hood? Is "nlp" a pretrained model, as understood in machine learning, and therefore some big file located somewhere on the disc?

I met an explanation, that 'nlp' is an 'object, containing process pipeline', but that only explains a little.

machine-learning spacy python-3.x nlp
1 Answers

You can always check the type of any python objects:

nlp = spacy.load('en_encore_web_sm') # or medium, or large
print(type(nlp))
print(dir(nlp))  # view a list of attributes

You will get something like this (depending on the passed arguments)

<class 'spacy.lang.en.English'>

You are right it is something like 'pretrained' model as it contains vocabulary, binary weights, etc.

Please check the official documentation:

https://spacy.io/api/language

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