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An Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Everyone
💫 Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python
Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
Stanford NLP Python library for tokenization, sentence segmentation, NER, and parsing of many human languages
Quick Overview
AllenNLP is an open-source NLP research library built on PyTorch. It provides high-level abstractions and APIs for developing and evaluating deep learning models for various NLP tasks. AllenNLP is designed to be flexible, modular, and easy to use for both researchers and practitioners in the field of natural language processing.
Pros
- Extensive collection of pre-built models and datasets for common NLP tasks
- Highly modular and extensible architecture, allowing easy customization
- Comprehensive documentation and tutorials for beginners and advanced users
- Active community and regular updates from the Allen Institute for AI
Cons
- Steeper learning curve compared to some other NLP libraries
- Can be resource-intensive for large-scale projects
- Some advanced features may require in-depth knowledge of PyTorch
- Limited support for non-English languages in some pre-built models
Code Examples
- Loading a pre-trained model and making predictions:
from allennlp.predictors.predictor import Predictor
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/bert-base-srl-2020.03.24.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="The cat sat on the mat.")
print(result)
- Training a custom text classification model:
from allennlp.data import DatasetReader, Instance
from allennlp.data.fields import TextField, LabelField
from allennlp.data.token_indexers import SingleIdTokenIndexer
from allennlp.models import Model
from allennlp.modules.text_field_embedders import BasicTextFieldEmbedder
from allennlp.modules.token_embedders import Embedding
from allennlp.nn.util import get_text_field_mask
from allennlp.training.trainer import Trainer
from allennlp.data.vocabulary import Vocabulary
from allennlp.predictors import TextClassifierPredictor
from allennlp.data.tokenizers import WhitespaceTokenizer
# Define your custom dataset reader, model, and training logic here
# ...
trainer = Trainer(model=model, optimizer=optimizer, data_loader=data_loader)
trainer.train()
- Using AllenNLP for named entity recognition:
from allennlp.predictors import Predictor
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/ner-model-2020.02.10.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="John Smith works at Google in New York.")
print(result)
Getting Started
To get started with AllenNLP, follow these steps:
- Install AllenNLP:
pip install allennlp
- Import the necessary modules:
from allennlp.predictors import Predictor
- Load a pre-trained model and make predictions:
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/fine-grained-ner.2021-02-11.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="AllenNLP is a great library for NLP tasks.")
print(result)
For more detailed instructions and advanced usage, refer to the official AllenNLP documentation and tutorials.
Competitor Comparisons
🤗 Transformers: State-of-the-art Machine Learning for Pytorch, TensorFlow, and JAX.
Pros of Transformers
- Broader model support, including many state-of-the-art architectures
- Larger community and more frequent updates
- Easier integration with popular deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow)
Cons of Transformers
- Steeper learning curve for beginners
- Less focus on traditional NLP tasks and linguistic annotations
- Can be overwhelming due to the large number of models and options
Code Comparison
AllenNLP:
from allennlp.predictors.predictor import Predictor
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/bert-base-srl-2020.03.24.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="Did Uriah honestly think he could beat the game in under three hours?")
Transformers:
from transformers import pipeline
nlp = pipeline("sentiment-analysis")
result = nlp("I love this movie!")
Both libraries offer high-level APIs for common NLP tasks, but Transformers provides a more streamlined approach with its pipeline functionality. AllenNLP tends to be more verbose and requires more setup for specific tasks. Transformers focuses on transformer-based models, while AllenNLP supports a wider range of traditional NLP models and techniques.
Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration
Pros of PyTorch
- More general-purpose deep learning framework, supporting a wider range of applications beyond NLP
- Larger community and ecosystem, with more third-party libraries and resources
- More flexible and dynamic computational graph, allowing for easier debugging and experimentation
Cons of PyTorch
- Steeper learning curve for beginners, especially those focused solely on NLP tasks
- Less specialized for NLP-specific tasks and models compared to AllenNLP
- Requires more boilerplate code for common NLP operations
Code Comparison
PyTorch (basic neural network):
import torch.nn as nn
class SimpleNN(nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.linear = nn.Linear(10, 1)
def forward(self, x):
return self.linear(x)
AllenNLP (text classification):
from allennlp.models import Model
@Model.register("text_classifier")
class TextClassifier(Model):
def __init__(self, vocab, embedder, encoder):
super().__init__(vocab)
self.embedder = embedder
self.encoder = encoder
self.classifier = nn.Linear(encoder.get_output_dim(), vocab.get_vocab_size('labels'))
An Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Everyone
Pros of TensorFlow
- Broader ecosystem and industry adoption
- Supports multiple programming languages (Python, JavaScript, C++)
- More extensive documentation and community resources
Cons of TensorFlow
- Steeper learning curve for beginners
- Can be more complex to set up and configure
- Less focused on natural language processing tasks
Code Comparison
AllenNLP example:
from allennlp.predictors.predictor import Predictor
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/bert-base-srl-2020.03.24.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="Did Uriah honestly think he could beat the game in under three hours?")
TensorFlow example:
import tensorflow as tf
mnist = tf.keras.datasets.mnist
(x_train, y_train), (x_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data()
model = tf.keras.models.Sequential([
tf.keras.layers.Flatten(input_shape=(28, 28)),
tf.keras.layers.Dense(128, activation='relu'),
tf.keras.layers.Dense(10, activation='softmax')
])
AllenNLP is more focused on NLP tasks, providing pre-built models and easy-to-use interfaces for common NLP operations. TensorFlow offers a more general-purpose machine learning framework with greater flexibility but requires more setup for specific tasks.
💫 Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python
Pros of spaCy
- Faster processing speed and lower memory usage
- More comprehensive built-in language models and support for multiple languages
- Easier integration with production systems due to its focus on efficiency
Cons of spaCy
- Less flexibility for custom model architectures
- Smaller community and fewer third-party extensions
- More limited support for deep learning tasks
Code Comparison
spaCy:
import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
doc = nlp("Apple is looking at buying U.K. startup for $1 billion")
for ent in doc.ents:
print(ent.text, ent.label_)
AllenNLP:
from allennlp.predictors.predictor import Predictor
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/ner-model-2020.02.10.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="Apple is looking at buying U.K. startup for $1 billion")
for entity in result["tags"]:
print(entity)
Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
Pros of fairseq
- More focused on sequence-to-sequence tasks and machine translation
- Extensive support for various architectures like Transformer, CNN, RNN
- Better optimized for performance and distributed training
Cons of fairseq
- Steeper learning curve for beginners
- Less comprehensive documentation compared to AllenNLP
- More specialized, potentially less versatile for general NLP tasks
Code Comparison
AllenNLP example:
from allennlp.predictors import Predictor
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/bert-base-srl-2020.03.24.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="Did Uriah honestly think he could beat the game in under three hours?")
fairseq example:
from fairseq.models.transformer import TransformerModel
en2de = TransformerModel.from_pretrained('/path/to/model', checkpoint_file='model.pt')
en2de.translate('Hello world!')
Both libraries offer high-level APIs for common NLP tasks, but fairseq is more focused on sequence-to-sequence models, while AllenNLP provides a broader range of NLP tools and models. fairseq's code tends to be more low-level and performance-oriented, while AllenNLP emphasizes ease of use and extensibility.
Stanford NLP Python library for tokenization, sentence segmentation, NER, and parsing of many human languages
Pros of Stanza
- Supports a wider range of languages (over 60) out-of-the-box
- Provides more comprehensive linguistic annotations, including dependency parsing and named entity recognition
- Offers a simpler API for basic NLP tasks, making it more accessible for beginners
Cons of Stanza
- Less flexible for custom model development compared to AllenNLP
- Fewer pre-built models and tasks available
- Limited support for deep learning frameworks (primarily uses PyTorch)
Code Comparison
Stanza:
import stanza
nlp = stanza.Pipeline('en')
doc = nlp("Hello world!")
print([(word.text, word.lemma, word.pos) for sent in doc.sentences for word in sent.words])
AllenNLP:
from allennlp.predictors.predictor import Predictor
predictor = Predictor.from_path("https://storage.googleapis.com/allennlp-public-models/structured-prediction-biaffine-parser-ontonotes-2020.02.10.tar.gz")
result = predictor.predict(sentence="Hello world!")
print([(token.text, token.lemma_, token.pos_) for token in result['tokens']])
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An Apache 2.0 NLP research library, built on PyTorch, for developing state-of-the-art deep learning models on a wide variety of linguistic tasks.
â ï¸ NOTICE: The AllenNLP library is now in maintenance mode. That means we are no longer adding new features or upgrading dependencies. We will still respond to questions and address bugs as they arise up until December 16th, 2022. If you have any concerns or are interested in maintaining AllenNLP going forward, please open an issue on this repository.
AllenNLP has been a big success, but as the field is advancing quickly it's time to focus on new initiatives. We're working hard to make AI2 Tango the best way to organize research codebases. If you are an active user of AllenNLP, here are some suggested alternatives:
- If you like the trainer, the configuration language, or are simply looking for a better way to manage your experiments, check out AI2 Tango.
- If you like AllenNLP's
modules
andnn
packages, check out delmaksym/allennlp-light. It's even compatible with AI2 Tango! - If you like the framework aspect of AllenNLP, check out flair. It has multiple state-of-art NLP models and allows you to easily use pretrained embeddings such as those from transformers.
- If you like the AllenNLP metrics package, check out torchmetrics. It has the same API as AllenNLP, so it should be a quick learning curve to make the switch.
- If you want to vectorize text, try the transformers library.
- If you want to maintain the AllenNLP Fairness or Interpret components, please get in touch. There is no alternative to it, so we are looking for a dedicated maintainer.
- If you are concerned about other AllenNLP functionality, please create an issue. Maybe we can find another way to continue supporting your use case.
Quick Links
- âï¸ Website
- ð¦ Guide
- ð¼ Gallery
- ð» Demo
- ð Documentation ( latest | stable | commit )
- â¬ï¸ Upgrade Guide from 1.x to 2.0
- â Stack Overflow
- â Contributing Guidelines
- ð¤ Officially Supported Models
- Pretrained Models
- Documentation ( latest | stable | commit )
- âï¸ Continuous Build
- ð Nightly Releases
In this README
- Getting Started Using the Library
- Plugins
- Package Overview
- Installation
- Running AllenNLP
- Issues
- Contributions
- Citing
- Team
Getting Started Using the Library
If you're interested in using AllenNLP for model development, we recommend you check out the AllenNLP Guide for a thorough introduction to the library, followed by our more advanced guides on GitHub Discussions.
When you're ready to start your project, we've created a couple of template repositories that you can use as a starting place:
- If you want to use
allennlp train
and config files to specify experiments, use this template. We recommend this approach. - If you'd prefer to use python code to configure your experiments and run your training loop, use this template. There are a few things that are currently a little harder in this setup (loading a saved model, and using distributed training), but otherwise it's functionality equivalent to the config files setup.
In addition, there are external tutorials:
- Hyperparameter optimization for AllenNLP using Optuna
- Training with multiple GPUs in AllenNLP
- Training on larger batches with less memory in AllenNLP
- How to upload transformer weights and tokenizers from AllenNLP to HuggingFace
And others on the AI2 AllenNLP blog.
Plugins
AllenNLP supports loading "plugins" dynamically. A plugin is just a Python package that
provides custom registered classes or additional allennlp
subcommands.
There is ecosystem of open source plugins, some of which are maintained by the AllenNLP team here at AI2, and some of which are maintained by the broader community.
Plugin | Maintainer | CLI | Description |
allennlp-models | AI2 | No | A collection of state-of-the-art models |
allennlp-semparse | AI2 | No | A framework for building semantic parsers |
allennlp-server | AI2 | Yes | A simple demo server for serving models |
allennlp-optuna | Makoto Hiramatsu | Yes | Optuna integration for hyperparameter optimization |
AllenNLP will automatically find any official AI2-maintained plugins that you have installed,
but for AllenNLP to find personal or third-party plugins you've installed,
you also have to create either a local plugins file named .allennlp_plugins
in the directory where you run the allennlp
command, or a global plugins file at ~/.allennlp/plugins
.
The file should list the plugin modules that you want to be loaded, one per line.
To test that your plugins can be found and imported by AllenNLP, you can run the allennlp test-install
command.
Each discovered plugin will be logged to the terminal.
For more information about plugins, see the plugins API docs. And for information on how to create a custom subcommand to distribute as a plugin, see the subcommand API docs.
Package Overview
allennlp | An open-source NLP research library, built on PyTorch |
allennlp.commands | Functionality for the CLI |
allennlp.common | Utility modules that are used across the library |
allennlp.data | A data processing module for loading datasets and encoding strings as integers for representation in matrices |
allennlp.fairness | A module for bias mitigation and fairness algorithms and metrics |
allennlp.modules | A collection of PyTorch modules for use with text |
allennlp.nn | Tensor utility functions, such as initializers and activation functions |
allennlp.training | Functionality for training models |
Installation
AllenNLP requires Python 3.6.1 or later and PyTorch.
We support AllenNLP on Mac and Linux environments. We presently do not support Windows but are open to contributions.
Installing via conda-forge
The simplest way to install AllenNLP is using conda (you can choose a different python version):
conda install -c conda-forge python=3.8 allennlp
To install optional packages, such as checklist
, use
conda install -c conda-forge allennlp-checklist
or simply install allennlp-all
directly. The plugins mentioned above are similarly installable, e.g.
conda install -c conda-forge allennlp-models allennlp-semparse allennlp-server allennlp-optuna
Installing via pip
It's recommended that you install the PyTorch ecosystem before installing AllenNLP by following the instructions on pytorch.org.
After that, just run pip install allennlp
.
â ï¸ If you're using Python 3.7 or greater, you should ensure that you don't have the PyPI version of
dataclasses
installed after running the above command, as this could cause issues on certain platforms. You can quickly check this by runningpip freeze | grep dataclasses
. If you see something likedataclasses=0.6
in the output, then just runpip uninstall -y dataclasses
.
If you need pointers on setting up an appropriate Python environment or would like to install AllenNLP using a different method, see below.
Setting up a virtual environment
Conda can be used set up a virtual environment with the version of Python required for AllenNLP. If you already have a Python 3 environment you want to use, you can skip to the 'installing via pip' section.
-
Create a Conda environment with Python 3.8 (3.7 or 3.9 would work as well):
conda create -n allennlp_env python=3.8
-
Activate the Conda environment. You will need to activate the Conda environment in each terminal in which you want to use AllenNLP:
conda activate allennlp_env
Installing the library and dependencies
Installing the library and dependencies is simple using pip
.
pip install allennlp
To install the optional dependencies, such as checklist
, run
pip install allennlp[checklist]
Or you can just install all optional dependencies with pip install allennlp[all]
.
Looking for bleeding edge features? You can install nightly releases directly from pypi
AllenNLP installs a script when you install the python package, so you can run allennlp commands just by typing allennlp
into a terminal. For example, you can now test your installation with allennlp test-install
.
You may also want to install allennlp-models
, which contains the NLP constructs to train and run our officially
supported models, many of which are hosted at https://demo.allennlp.org.
pip install allennlp-models
Installing using Docker
Docker provides a virtual machine with everything set up to run AllenNLP-- whether you will leverage a GPU or just run on a CPU. Docker provides more isolation and consistency, and also makes it easy to distribute your environment to a compute cluster.
AllenNLP provides official Docker images with the library and all of its dependencies installed.
Once you have installed Docker, you should also install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit if you have GPUs available.
Then run the following command to get an environment that will run on GPU:
mkdir -p $HOME/.allennlp/
docker run --rm --gpus all -v $HOME/.allennlp:/root/.allennlp allennlp/allennlp:latest
You can test the Docker environment with
docker run --rm --gpus all -v $HOME/.allennlp:/root/.allennlp allennlp/allennlp:latest test-install
If you don't have GPUs available, just omit the --gpus all
flag.
Building your own Docker image
For various reasons you may need to create your own AllenNLP Docker image, such as if you need a different version
of PyTorch. To do so, just run make docker-image
from the root of your local clone of AllenNLP.
By default this builds an image with the tag allennlp/allennlp
, but you can change this to anything you want
by setting the DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME
flag when you call make
. For example,
make docker-image DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME=my-allennlp
.
If you want to use a different version of Python or PyTorch, set the flags DOCKER_PYTHON_VERSION
and DOCKER_TORCH_VERSION
to something like
3.9
and 1.9.0-cuda10.2
, respectively. These flags together determine the base image that is used. You can see the list of valid
combinations in this GitHub Container Registry: github.com/allenai/docker-images/pkgs/container/pytorch.
After building the image you should be able to see it listed by running docker images allennlp
.
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
allennlp/allennlp latest b66aee6cb593 5 minutes ago 2.38GB
Installing from source
You can also install AllenNLP by cloning our git repository:
git clone https://github.com/allenai/allennlp.git
Create a Python 3.7 or 3.8 virtual environment, and install AllenNLP in editable
mode by running:
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
pip install --editable .[dev,all]
This will make allennlp
available on your system but it will use the sources from the local clone
you made of the source repository.
You can test your installation with allennlp test-install
.
See https://github.com/allenai/allennlp-models
for instructions on installing allennlp-models
from source.
Running AllenNLP
Once you've installed AllenNLP, you can run the command-line interface
with the allennlp
command (whether you installed from pip
or from source).
allennlp
has various subcommands such as train
, evaluate
, and predict
.
To see the full usage information, run allennlp --help
.
You can test your installation by running allennlp test-install
.
Issues
Everyone is welcome to file issues with either feature requests, bug reports, or general questions. As a small team with our own internal goals, we may ask for contributions if a prompt fix doesn't fit into our roadmap. To keep things tidy we will often close issues we think are answered, but don't hesitate to follow up if further discussion is needed.
Contributions
The AllenNLP team at AI2 (@allenai) welcomes contributions from the community.
If you're a first time contributor, we recommend you start by reading our CONTRIBUTING.md guide.
Then have a look at our issues with the tag Good First Issue
.
If you would like to contribute a larger feature, we recommend first creating an issue with a proposed design for discussion. This will prevent you from spending significant time on an implementation which has a technical limitation someone could have pointed out early on. Small contributions can be made directly in a pull request.
Pull requests (PRs) must have one approving review and no requested changes before they are merged. As AllenNLP is primarily driven by AI2 we reserve the right to reject or revert contributions that we don't think are good additions.
Citing
If you use AllenNLP in your research, please cite AllenNLP: A Deep Semantic Natural Language Processing Platform.
@inproceedings{Gardner2017AllenNLP,
title={AllenNLP: A Deep Semantic Natural Language Processing Platform},
author={Matt Gardner and Joel Grus and Mark Neumann and Oyvind Tafjord
and Pradeep Dasigi and Nelson F. Liu and Matthew Peters and
Michael Schmitz and Luke S. Zettlemoyer},
year={2017},
Eprint = {arXiv:1803.07640},
}
Team
AllenNLP is an open-source project backed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). AI2 is a non-profit institute with the mission to contribute to humanity through high-impact AI research and engineering. To learn more about who specifically contributed to this codebase, see our contributors page.
Top Related Projects
🤗 Transformers: State-of-the-art Machine Learning for Pytorch, TensorFlow, and JAX.
Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration
An Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Everyone
💫 Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python
Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
Stanford NLP Python library for tokenization, sentence segmentation, NER, and parsing of many human languages
Convert designs to code with AI
Introducing Visual Copilot: A new AI model to turn Figma designs to high quality code using your components.
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