fastText/python/README.rst

fastText
========

`fastText <https://fasttext.cc/>`__ is a library for efficient learning
of word representations and sentence classification.

Requirements
------------

`fastText <https://fasttext.cc/>`__ builds on modern Mac OS and Linux
distributions. Since it uses C++11 features, it requires a compiler with
good C++11 support. These include :

-  (gcc-4.8 or newer) or (clang-3.3 or newer)

You will need

-  `Python <https://www.python.org/>`__ version 2.7 or >=3.4
-  `NumPy <http://www.numpy.org/>`__ &
   `SciPy <https://www.scipy.org/>`__
-  `pybind11 <https://github.com/pybind/pybind11>`__

Building fastText
-----------------

The easiest way to get the latest version of `fastText is to use
pip <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fasttext>`__.

::

    $ pip install fasttext

If you want to use the latest unstable release you will need to build
from source using setup.py.

Now you can import this library with

::

    import fastText

Examples
--------

In general it is assumed that the reader already has good knowledge of
fastText. For this consider the main
`README <https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/README.md>`__
and in particular `the tutorials on our
website <https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/supervised-tutorial.html>`__.

We recommend you look at the `examples within the doc
folder <https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/tree/master/python/doc/examples>`__.

As with any package you can get help on any Python function using the
help function.

For example

::

    +>>> import fastText
    +>>> help(fastText.FastText)

    Help on module fastText.FastText in fastText:

    NAME
        fastText.FastText

    DESCRIPTION
        # Copyright (c) 2017-present, Facebook, Inc.
        # All rights reserved.
        #
        # This source code is licensed under the MIT license found in the
        # LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.

    FUNCTIONS
        load_model(path)
            Load a model given a filepath and return a model object.

        tokenize(text)
            Given a string of text, tokenize it and return a list of tokens
    [...]

IMPORTANT: Preprocessing data / enconding conventions
-----------------------------------------------------

In general it is important to properly preprocess your data. In
particular our example scripts in the `root
folder <https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText>`__ do this.

fastText assumes UTF-8 encoded text. All text must be `unicode for
Python2 <https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#unicode>`__
and `str for
Python3 <https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html#textseq>`__.
The passed text will be `encoded as UTF-8 by
pybind11 <https://pybind11.readthedocs.io/en/master/advanced/cast/strings.html?highlight=utf-8#strings-bytes-and-unicode-conversions>`__
before passed to the fastText C++ library. This means it is important to
use UTF-8 encoded text when building a model. On Unix-like systems you
can convert text using `iconv <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconv>`__.

fastText will tokenize (split text into pieces) based on the following
ASCII characters (bytes). In particular, it is not aware of UTF-8
whitespace. We advice the user to convert UTF-8 whitespace / word
boundaries into one of the following symbols as appropiate.

-  space
-  tab
-  vertical tab
-  carriage return
-  formfeed
-  the null character

The newline character is used to delimit lines of text. In particular,
the EOS token is appended to a line of text if a newline character is
encountered. The only exception is if the number of tokens exceeds the
MAX\_LINE\_SIZE constant as defined in the `Dictionary
header <https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/src/dictionary.h>`__.
This means if you have text that is not separate by newlines, such as
the `fil9 dataset <http://mattmahoney.net/dc/textdata>`__, it will be
broken into chunks with MAX\_LINE\_SIZE of tokens and the EOS token is
not appended.

The length of a token is the number of UTF-8 characters by considering
the `leading two bits of a
byte <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description>`__ to identify
`subsequent bytes of a multi-byte
sequence <https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/src/dictionary.cc>`__.
Knowing this is especially important when choosing the minimum and
maximum length of subwords. Further, the EOS token (as specified in the
`Dictionary
header <https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/src/dictionary.h>`__)
is considered a character and will not be broken into subwords.