Transformers and spaCy

spaCy v3.0 was released with great new features and components. The most exciting new feature is undoubtedly transformer-based pipelines. The new transformer-based pipelines bring spaCy's accuracy to the state of the art. Integrating transformers into the spaCy NLP pipeline introduced one more pipeline component called Transformer. This component allows us to use all HuggingFace models with spaCy pipelines. If we recall from Chapter 2, Core Operations with spaCy, this is what the spaCy NLP pipeline looks like without transformers:

Figure 9.11 – Vector-based spaCy pipeline components

With the release of v3.0, v2 style spaCy models are still supported and transformer-based models are introduced. A transformer-based pipeline component looks like the following:

Figure 9.12 – Transformed-based spaCy pipeline components

For each supported language, transformer-based models and v2 style models are...