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gensim v4.0.0.beta Release Notes

Release Date: 2020-10-31 // over 3 years ago

  • 4.0.0beta, 2020-10-31

    ⚡️ ⚠️ Gensim 4.0 contains breaking API changes! See the Migration guide to update your existing Gensim 3.x code and models.

    Main highlights

    ⚡️ Massively optimized popular algorithms the community has grown to love: fastText, word2vec, doc2vec, phrases:

    a. Efficiency

    | model | 3.8.3
    wall time / peak RAM / throughput | 4.0.0
    wall time / peak RAM / throughput | | --- | --- | --- | | fastText | 2.9h / 4.11 GB / 822k words/s | 2.3h / 1.26 GB / 914k words/s | | word2vec | 1.7h / 0.36 GB / 1685k words/s | 1.2h / 0.33 GB / 1762k words/s |

    In other words, fastText now needs 3x less RAM (and is faster); word2vec has 2x faster init (and needs less RAM, and is faster); detecting collocation phrases is 2x faster. 4.0 benchmarks.

    b. Robustness. We fixed a bunch of long-standing bugs by refactoring the internal code structure (see 🔴 Bug fixes below)

    c. Simplified OOP model for easier model exports and integration with TensorFlow, PyTorch &co.

    ⚡️ These improvements come to you transparently aka "for free", but see Migration guide for some changes that break the old Gensim 3.x API. Update your code accordingly.

    ⬇️ Dropped a bunch of externally contributed modules: summarization, pivoted TFIDF normalization, wrappers for 3rd party libraries: Mallet, scikit-learn, DTM model, Vowpal Wabbit, wordrank, varembed.

    👍 Why? Code quality was not up to our standards. Also there was no one to maintain them, answer user questions, support these modules and wrappers.

    📄 So rather than let them rot, we took the hard decision of removing these contributed modules from Gensim. If anyone's interested in maintaining them please fork into your own repo, they can live happily outside of Gensim, linked to as "contributed" from Gensim docs.

    ⬇️ Dropped Python 2. Gensim 4.0 is Py3.6+. Read our Python version support policy.

    - If you still need Python 2 for some reason, stay at Gensim 3.8.3.

    A new Gensim website – finally! 🙃

    So, a major clean-up release overall. We're happy with this tighter, leaner and faster Gensim.

    ✅ This is the direction we'll keep going forward: less kitchen-sink of "latest academic fad", more focus on robust engineering, targetting common NLP & document similarity use-cases.

    🚀 Why a pre-release?

    🐎 This 4.0.0beta pre-release is for users who want the cutting edge performance and bug fixes. Plus users who want to help out, by testing and providing feedback : code, documentation, workflows… Please let us know on the mailing list!

    🚀 Install the pre-release with:

    pip install --pre --upgrade gensim

    🚀 What will change between this pre-release and a "full" 4.0 release?

    Check progress here.

    🍱 👍 Improvements

    🍱 📚 Tutorials and docs

    🍱 🔴 Bug fixes

    • #2891: Fix fastText word-vectors with ngrams off, by @gojomo
    • #2907: Fix doc2vec crash for large sets of doc-vectors, by @gojomo
    • #2899: Fix similarity bug in NMSLIB indexer, by @piskvorky
    • 🗄 #2899: Fix deprecation warnings in Annoy integration, by @piskvorky
    • #2901: Fix inheritance of WikiCorpus from TextCorpus, by @jenishah
    • 🗄 #2940; Fix deprecations in SoftCosineSimilarity, by @Witiko
    • #2944: Fix save_facebook_model failure after update-vocab & other initialization streamlining, by @gojomo
    • 🚚 #2846: Fix for Python 3.9/3.10: remove xml.etree.cElementTree, by @hugovk
    • #2973: phrases.export_phrases() doesn't yield all bigrams
    • #2942: Segfault when training doc2vec

    🍱 ⚠️ Removed functionality & deprecations

    • #6: No more binary wheels for x32 platforms, by menshikh-iv
    • #2899: Renamed overly broad similarities.index to the more appropriate similarities.annoy, by @piskvorky
    • 📦 #2958: Remove gensim.summarization subpackage, docs and test data, by @mpenkov
    • #2926: Rename num_words to topn in dtm_coherence, by @MeganStodel
    • 🚚 #2937: Remove Keras dependency, by @piskvorky
    • ✂ Removed all code, methods, attributes and functions marked as deprecated in Gensim 3.8.3.