After reading the docs and doing the tutorial I figured I'd make a small demo. Turns out my model does not want to train. Here's the code

import spacy
import random
import jsonTRAINING_DATA = [["My little kitty is so special", {"KAT": True}],["Dude, Totally, Yeah, Video Games", {"KAT": False}],["Should I pay $1,000 for the iPhone X?", {"KAT": False}],["The iPhone 8 reviews are here", {"KAT": False}],["Noa is a great cat name.", {"KAT": True}],["We got a new kitten!", {"KAT": True}]
]nlp = spacy.blank("en")
category = nlp.create_pipe("textcat")
nlp.add_pipe(category)
category.add_label("KAT")# Start the training
nlp.begin_training()# Loop for 10 iterations
for itn in range(100):# Shuffle the training datarandom.shuffle(TRAINING_DATA)losses = {}# Batch the examples and iterate over themfor batch in spacy.util.minibatch(TRAINING_DATA, size=2):texts = [text for text, entities in batch]annotations = [{"textcat": [entities]} for text, entities in batch]nlp.update(texts, annotations, losses=losses)if itn % 20 == 0:print(losses)

When I run this the output suggests that very little is learned.

{'textcat': 0.0}
{'textcat': 0.0}
{'textcat': 0.0}
{'textcat': 0.0}
{'textcat': 0.0}

This feels wrong. There should be an error or a meaningful tag. The predictions confirm this.

for text, d in TRAINING_DATA:print(text, nlp(text).cats)# Dude, Totally, Yeah, Video Games {'KAT': 0.45303162932395935}
# The iPhone 8 reviews are here {'KAT': 0.45303162932395935}
# Noa is a great cat name. {'KAT': 0.45303162932395935}
# Should I pay $1,000 for the iPhone X? {'KAT': 0.45303162932395935}
# We got a new kitten! {'KAT': 0.45303162932395935}
# My little kitty is so special {'KAT': 0.45303162932395935}

It feels like my code is missing something but I can't figure out what.

If you update and use spaCy 3 - the code above will no longer work. The solution is to migrate with some changes. I've modified the example from cantdutchthis accordingly.

Summary of changes:

• use the config to change the architecture. The old default was "bag of words", the new default is "text ensemble" which uses attention. Keep this in mind when tuning the models
• labels now need to be one-hot encoded
• the add_pipe interface has changed slightly
• nlp.update now requires an Example object rather than a tuple of text, annotation

import spacy
# Add imports for example, as well as textcat config...
from spacy.training import Example
from spacy.pipeline.textcat import single_label_bow_config, single_label_default_config
from thinc.api import Config
import random# labels should be one-hot encoded
TRAINING_DATA = [["My little kitty is so special", {"KAT0": True}],["Dude, Totally, Yeah, Video Games", {"KAT1": True}],["Should I pay $1,000 for the iPhone X?", {"KAT1": True}],["The iPhone 8 reviews are here", {"KAT1": True}],["Noa is a great cat name.", {"KAT0": True}],["We got a new kitten!", {"KAT0": True}]
]# bow
# config = Config().from_str(single_label_bow_config)# textensemble with attention
config = Config().from_str(single_label_default_config)nlp = spacy.blank("en")
# now uses `add_pipe` instead
category = nlp.add_pipe("textcat", last=True, config=config)
category.add_label("KAT0")
category.add_label("KAT1")# Start the training
nlp.begin_training()# Loop for 10 iterations
for itn in range(100):# Shuffle the training datarandom.shuffle(TRAINING_DATA)losses = {}# Batch the examples and iterate over themfor batch in spacy.util.minibatch(TRAINING_DATA, size=4):texts = [nlp.make_doc(text) for text, entities in batch]annotations = [{"cats": entities} for text, entities in batch]# uses an example object rather than text/annotation tupleexamples = [Example.from_dict(doc, annotation) for doc, annotation in zip(texts, annotations)]nlp.update(examples, losses=losses)if itn % 20 == 0:print(losses)