✨ New features and improvements

• NEW: New apply CLI command to annotate new documents with a trained pipeline (#11376).
• NEW: New benchmark CLI command to benchmark pipelines. The new benchmark speed subcommand measures the speed of a pipeline, the benchmark accuracy subcommand is a new alias for evaluate (#11902).
• NEW: New find-threshold CLI command to identify an optimal threshold for classification models (#11280).
• NEW: New FUZZY Matcher operator for fuzzy matches based on Levenshtein edit distance. In addition, the FUZZY and REGEX operators are now supported in combination with IN/NOT_IN. (#11359).
• Language updates for Ancient Greek, Dutch, Russian, Slovenian and Ukrainian (#11345, #11162, #11426, #11753, #11811, #11997, more details below).
• Allow up to typer v0.7.x (#11720), mypy 0.990 (#11801) and typing_extensions v4.4.x (#12036).
• New spacy.ConsoleLogger.v3 with expanded progress tracking (#11972).
• Improved scoring behavior for textcat with spacy.textcat_scorer.v2 (#11696 and #11971) and spacy.textcat_multilabel_scorer.v2 (#11820).
• Improved customizability of the knowledge base used for entity linking, with the default implementation being the new InMemoryLookupKB (#11268).
• Optional before_update callback that is invoked at the start of each training step (#11739).
• Improve performance of SpanGroup (#11380).
• Improve UX around displacy.serve when the default port is in use (#11948).
• Patch a security vulnerability in extracting tar files (#11746).
• Add equality definition for vectors (#11806).
• Allow interpolation of variables in directory names in projects (#11235).
• Update default component configs to use the latest tok2vec version (#11618).

🔴 Bug fixes

• 11382: Fix lookup behavior for the French and Catalan lemmatizers.

• 11385: Ensure that downstream components can train properly on a frozen tok2vec or transformer layer.

• 11762: Support local file system remotes for projects.

• 11763: Raise an error when unsupported values are used for textcat.

• 11834: Ensure Vocab.to_disk respects the exclude setting for lookups and vectors.

• 12009: Fix a few typing issues for SpanGroup and Span objects.

• 12098: Correctly handle missing annotations in the edit tree lemmatizer.

⚠️ Backwards incompatibilities and model updates

The following changes may require you to update code that is using the relevant functionality:

• An error is now raised when unsupported values are given as input to train a textcat or textcat_multilabel model - ensure that values are 0.0 or 1.0 as explained in the docs.

The following changes may influence the output of your language pipeline or trained models:

• Updates to language defaults:
  • Extended support for Slovenian (#11162).
  • Switch Russian and Ukrainian lemmatizers to pymorphy3 (#11345, #11811).
  • Support for editorial punctuation in Ancient Greek (#11426).
  • Update to Russian tokenizer exceptions (#11753).
  • Small fix in the list of Dutch stop words (#11997).
• Updates to model defaults:
  • Use the latest tok2vec defaults in all components (#11618).
  • Improve the default attributes used for the textcat and textcat_multilabel components (#11698).
  • Update the default scorer for textcat and textcat_multilabel to fix a bug related to threshold for textcat and to make it possible to score multiple textcat/textcat_multilabel components in a single pipeline with custom scorers. If no custom scorers are used, the cat_p/r/f scores will now only reflect the final component's labels and performance (#11696, #11820).
  • Correct the token_acc score to report the intended measure (# correct tokens / # predicted tokens, the same as in spaCy v2). The token_acc scores for v3.5 will be lower for the same performance because they were incorrectly inflated in v3.0-v3.4. The token_p/r/f scores should remain unchanged (#12073).

The following functionality will be changed in the near future - so it's best to start updating your scripts now to make them more generic:

• From v4 onwards, we'll rename the master branch to main.

📦 Trained pipelines updates

• The CNN pipelines add IS_SPACE as a tok2vec feature for tagger and morphologizer components to improve tagging of non-whitespace vs. whitespace tokens.
• The transformer pipelines require spacy-transformers v1.2, which uses the exact alignment from tokenizers for fast tokenizers instead of the heuristic alignment from spacy-alignments. For all trained pipelines except ja_core_news_trf, the alignments between spaCy tokens and transformer tokens may be slightly different. More details about the spacy-transformers changes in the v1.2.0 release notes.

📖 Documentation and examples

• We've ported our website from Gatsby to Next 🥳
• Updated the documentation on supported languages.
• Added a note about experimental M1 GPU support to the installation quickstart.
• Included documentation for the biluo_to_iob and iob_to_biluo functions.
• Fixed model links in the v3.4 usage documentation.
• Removed "new" tags of functionality from spaCy v2.x.
• Various small additions, spelling and typo fixes.
• spaCy Universe additions:
  • greCy: Providing Ancient Greek models
  • spacy-pythainlp: Add Thai support for spaCy
• New projects:
  • Accelerate NER with Speedster (experimental)

👥 Contributors

@aaronzipp, @adrianeboyd, @albertvillanova, @ArchiDevil, @cfuerbachersparks, @damian-romero, @danieldk, @darigovresearch, @DSLituiev, @essenmitsosse, @gremur, @honnibal, @ines, @jmyerston, @JosPolfliet, @kadarakos, @koaning, @kwhumphreys, @ljvmiranda921, @MarcoGorelli, @orglce, @pmbaumgartner, @polm, @richardpaulhudson, @rmitsch, @ryndaniels, @shadeMe, @svlandeg, @thomashacker, @TrellixVulnTeam, @wannaphong, @zhiiw, @zrpxx