An R wrapper to the spaCy “industrial strength natural language processing”" Python library from https://spacy.io.

Installing the package

1. Install miniconda

   The easiest way to install spaCy and spacyr is through the spacyr function spacy_install(). This function by default creates a new conda environment called spacy_condaenv, as long as some version of conda is installed on the user’s the system. You can install miniconda from https://conda.io/miniconda.html. (Choose the 64-bit version, or alternatively, run to the computer store now and purchase a 64-bit system to replace your ancient 32-bit platform.)

   If you already have any version of conda, you can skip this step. You can check it by entering conda --version in the Terminal.

   For a Windows-based system, Visual C++ Build Tools or Visual Studio Express must be installed to compile spaCy for pip installation. The version of Visual Studio required for the installation of spaCy is found here and the default python version used in our installation method is 3.6.x.

2. Install the spacyr R package:

   • From GitHub:

     To install the latest package from source, you can simply run the following.

   devtools::install_github("quanteda/spacyr", build_vignettes = FALSE)

   • From CRAN:

   install.packages("spacyr")

3. Install spaCy in a conda environment

   • For Windows, you need to run R as an administrator to make installation work properly. To do so, right click the RStudio icon (or R desktop icon) and select “Run as administrator” when launching R.

   • To install spaCy, you can simply run

   library("spacyr")
   spacy_install()

   This will create a stand-alone conda environment including a python executable separate from your system Python (or anaconda python), install the latest version of spaCy (and its required packages), and download English language model. After installation, you can initialize spaCy in R with

   spacy_initialize()

   This will return the following message if spaCy was installed with this method.

   ## Found 'spacy_condaenv'. spacyr will use this environment
   ## successfully initialized (spaCy Version: 2.0.18, language model: en)
   ## (python options: type = "condaenv", value = "spacy_condaenv")

4. (optional) Add more language models

   For spaCy installed by spacy_install(), spacyr provides a useful helper function to install additional language models. For instance, to install German language model

   spacy_download_langmodel("de")

   (Again, Windows users have to run this command as an administrator. Otherwise, he symlink (alias) to the language model will fail.)

Permanently setting the default Python

If you are using the same setting for spaCy (e.g. condaenv or python path) every time and want to reduce the time for initialization, you can fixate the setting by specifying it in an R-startup file (For Mac/Linux, the file is ~/.Rprofile), which is read every time a new R is launched. You can set the option permanently when you call spacy_initialize():

spacy_initialize(save_profile = TRUE)

Once this is appropriately set up, the message from spacy_initialize() changes to something like:

## spacy python option is already set, spacyr will use:
##  condaenv = "spacy_condaenv"
## successfully initialized (spaCy Version: 2.0.18, language model: en)
## (python options: type = "condaenv", value = "spacy_condaenv")

To ignore the permanently set options, you can initialize spacy with refresh_settings = TRUE.

Comments and feedback

We welcome your comments and feedback. Please file issues on the issues page, and/or send us comments at kbenoit@lse.ac.uk and A.Matsuo@lse.ac.uk.