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Changelog

5.3.1 - 2025-08-20

Fixed

  • Downgraded the pypdfium2 dependency, since the version we were using was removed from PyPI.

5.3.0 - 2025-06-19

Added

  • Added sparv plugins command to list and manage Sparv plugins.
  • Added --compact flag for sparv schema command, resulting in compact output.
  • Added --json flag for sparv modules command.
  • The command sparv modules now also takes annotators in addition to modules as arguments to filter the output.
  • The detailed sparv modules listings now include info about accepted values for config variables.
  • Sparv now respects the JAVA_HOME environment variable.
  • Added autocomplete instructions for zsh.
  • Added 'misc:fake_text_headtail' annotator.
  • Added compressed versions of the SBX frequency list exports.
  • Added utility functions: util.install.install_svn and util.install.uninstall_svn for adding files to or removing them from an SVN repository (user credentials are retrieved from the environment variables SVN_USERNAME and SVN_PASSWORD).
  • Added utility functions: util.install.install_git and util.install.uninstall_git for adding files to or removing them from a local Git repository.
  • Added misc:metadata_from_filename annotator, to extract metadata from filenames.
  • Added support for using len() on instances of the Annotation class, replacing the get_size() method which will be removed in a future version of Sparv.
  • Sparv can now be used as a library by importing the sparv package.
  • Added swener.timeout setting to set a timeout for SweNER.

Changed

  • Changed distribution name from sparv-pipeline to sparv.
  • Dropped support for Python 3.8 and 3.9.
  • The internal data format (in the sparv-workdir directory) has been changed for performance reasons. You will need to run sparv clean before running Sparv on any existing corpora using the old data format.
  • Updated documentation with a fresh new look!
  • The parameters append and allow_newline have been removed from the Sparv class methods to simplify the code. The append parameter was never used, and newlines are now preserved by default.
  • xml_export:compressed and xml_export:compressed_scrambled no longer need to first create uncompressed combined files.
  • Removed the indent_xml utility function, as ElementTree now supports XML indentation natively since Python 3.9.
  • Sparv now prints a warning message if a module, annotator, or output annotation is missing a description.
  • Sparv now prints a warning message if an annotator has parameters without type hints.
  • Instances of AnnotationAllSourceFiles, AnnotationDataAllSourceFiles, OutputAllSourceFiles, and OutputDataAllSourceFiles can now be called with a source file name to get the respective non-all-source-files instance. This is now the recommended way to use these classes, and the previous methods will be removed in a future major release.
  • Changed library used for parsing PDF files from pdfplumber to pypdfium2.
  • Plugin module name convention is now enforced.
  • The logs directory is now always created relative to the corpus directory instead of the directory where sparv is run.
  • Detailed error messages are now always printed to the log file, no matter the log level.
  • The outputs parameter for importers can now accept a list of multiple Config objects, instead of just one.

Fixed

  • Fixed Stanza, which was broken for English.
  • SweNER no longer hangs on extremely long tokens.
  • Fixed configuration validation for korp.context and korp.within.
  • Fixed a crash when removing namespaces from attributes in xml_import:parse.
  • Fixed tab autocompletion, which was not working with Python 3.12.
  • Fixed an issue with util.system.gpus() when used with PyTorch's torch.cuda.set_device().
  • Fixed bug in stats_export which caused it to crash sometimes.
  • Better handling of whitespace in tokens in the cwb and wsd modules.
  • Fixed SSL certificate verification issues when downloading models.
  • Fixed problem when entering relative path as Sparv data directory.

5.2.0 - 2023-12-07

Added

  • Added support for tab autocompletion in bash.
  • Added importer for PDF files.
  • Added new misc:inherit annotator for inheriting attributes.
  • Added korp.wordpicture_no_sentences setting to disable generation of Word Picture sentences table.
  • util.mysql_wrapper can now execute SQL queries remotely over SSH.
  • Added several uninstallers:
  • cwb:uninstall_corpus
  • korp:uninstall_config
  • korp:uninstall_lemgrams
  • korp:uninstall_timespan
  • korp:uninstall_wordpicture
  • stats_export:uninstall_freq_list
  • stats_export:uninstall_sbx_freq_list
  • stats_export:uninstall_sbx_freq_list_date
  • xml_export:uninstall
  • xml_export:uninstall
  • Added MarkerOptional class.
  • Added stats export for Swedish from the 1800s.
  • korp:wordpicture table name is now configurable using korp.wordpicture_table.
  • Added utility function util.system.gpus() which returns a list of GPUs, ordered by free memory in descending order.
  • Sparv will automatically order the GPUs in the environment variable CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES by the amount of free memory that was available when Sparv started.
  • Stanza now always selects the GPU with the most free memory.
  • The preloader can now be gracefully stopped by sending an interrupt signal to the Sparv process.
  • Added HeaderAnnotations and HeaderAnnotationsAllSourceFiles classes.
  • Added korp.keep_undefined_annotations setting, to include even undefined annotations in the Korp config.
  • Added dateformat.pre_regex setting.
  • Added --json-log flag to enable JSON format for logging.
  • Added support for restricting a whole module to one or more languages by using the __language__ variable.
  • Running sparv schema will now generate a JSON schema which can be used to validate corpus config files.
  • More strict config validation, including validation of config values and data types.
  • Most Sparv decorators now have a priority parameter, to control the order in which functions are run.
  • Added util.misc.dump_yaml() utility function for exporting YAML.

Changed

  • Added support for Python 3.10 and 3.11.
  • Dropped support for Python 3.6 and 3.7.
  • AnnotationAllSourceFiles now have the same methods as Annotation.
  • The util function install_mysql can now install locally as well as to a remote server.
  • Pre-built SALDO models are now downloaded instead of being built on demand.
  • xml_export:install and xml_export:install_scrambled can now install locally.
  • korp:relations, korp:relations_sql and korp:install_relations has been renamed to korp:wordpicture, korp:wordpicture_sql and korp:install_wordpicture respectively.
  • Target path is no longer optional for the utility functions install_path and rsync.
  • The classes SourceAnnotations and SourceAnnotationsAllSourceFiles are now pre-parsed, immutable iterables instead of lists that need parsing and expanding.
  • The classes AllSourceFilenames, ExportAnnotations, ExportAnnotationsAllSourceFiles and ExportAnnotationNames are now immutable iterables instead of lists.
  • Removed the flags --rerun-incomplete and --mark-complete, as Sparv will now always rerun incomplete files.
  • Sparv will now recognize when source files have been deleted and trigger the necessary reruns. Previously, only additions and modifications were recognized.
  • Illegal characters are now replaced with underscore in XML element and attribute names during XML export. This also applies to CWB and Korp config exports.
  • Not specifying a corpus language now excludes all language specific annotators.
  • When an unhandled exception occurs, the relevant source document will be displayed in the log.
  • localhost as an installation target is no longer handled as if host was omitted.
  • Removed critical log level.

Fixed

  • Several bugs fixed in korp:config.
  • Fixed bug where Sparv would hang if an error occurred in a preloaded annotator.
  • Fixed occasional crash in cwb:encode when old CWB export hadn't been removed first.
  • Fixed bug when using relative socket path while also using --dir.
  • Fixed quoting of paths in util.system.rsync.
  • It's no longer possible to create an infinite loop of classes referring to each other.
  • Elapsed time exceeding 24 hours no longer gets cut off in the --stats output.
  • Fixed bug where error messages were not getting written to the log file when the --log debug flag was used.
  • Fixed bug that prevented Stanza from using GPU.
  • Fixed crash when exporting scrambled XML without any text.

5.1.0 - 2022-11-03

Added

  • Added exporter for Korp frontend config files.
  • Added the --keep-going flag, which makes Sparv continue with other independent tasks when a task fails.
  • Added an overview of some of the built-in annotations in the documentation.
  • Added AnnotationName and ExportAnnotationNames classes, to be used instead of the is_input parameter.
  • Lists of annotations can now be used as input and output for annotators by using the List type hint.
  • Added support for optional annotator outputs.
  • Added support for uninstallers using the @uninstaller decorator.
  • Added Marker and OutputMarker classes, to be used mainly by installers and uninstallers.
  • Added a new annotator misc:concat2 which concatenates two or more annotations with an optional separator.
  • Added a remove method to the Annotation classes for removing annotation files.
  • Added a metadata field: short_description.
  • Added a setting for truncating the annotations misc.head and misc.tail to avoid crashes by cwb-encode.

Changed

  • Removed the is_input parameter from the ExportAnnotationsAllSourceFiles class as it didn't make sense.
  • Installers and uninstallers are now required to create markers.
  • Removed Korp modes info from CWB info file as it is included in the Korp config.
  • Disable highlighting of numbers in the log output because it was confusing.
  • Slightly improved the sbx_freq_list_date exporter.
  • The util functions install_directory and ìnstall_file have been replaced by the more general install_path.

Fixed

  • Fixed 'maximum recursion depth exceeded' problem by upgrading Stanza.
  • The preloader now respects the compression setting.
  • Fixed progress bars not working when running preloaded annotators.
  • Fixed a rare logging crash.

5.0.0 - 2022-08-10

Added

  • Added a quick start guide in the documentation.
  • Added importers for more file formats: docx and odt.
  • Added support for language varieties.
  • Re-introduced analyses for Old Swedish and Swedish from the 1800's.
  • Added a more flexible stats export which lets you choose which annotations to include in the frequency list.
  • Added installer for stats export.
  • Added Stanza support for English.
  • Added better install and uninstall instructions for plugins.
  • Added support for XML namespaces.
  • Added explicit ref annotations (indexing tokens within sentences) for Stanza, Malt and Stanford.
  • Added a --reset flag to the sparv setup command for resetting the data directory setting.
  • Added a separate installer for installing scrambled CWB files.
  • A warning message is printed when Sparv discovers source files that don't match the file extension in the corpus config.
  • An error message is shown if unknown exporters are listed under export.default.
  • Allow source annotations named "not".
  • Added a source filename annotator.
  • Show an error message if user specifies an invalid installation.
  • Added a --stats flag to several commands, showing a summary after completion of time spent per annotator.
  • Added stanza.max_token_length option.
  • Added Hunpos-backoff annotation for Stanza msd and pos.
  • Added --force flag to run-rule and create-file commands to force recreation of the listed targets.
  • Added a new exporter which produces a YAML file with info about the Sparv version and annotation date. This info is also added to the combined XML exports.
  • Exit with an error message if a required executable is missing.
  • Show a warning if an installed plugin is incompatible with Sparv.
  • Introduced compression of annotation files in sparv-workdir. The type of compression can be configured (or disabled) by using the sparv.compression variable. gzip is used by default.
  • Add flags --rerun-incomplete and --mark-complete to the sparv run command for handling incomplete output files.
  • Several exporters now show a warning if a token annotation isn't included in the list of export annotations.
  • Added get_size() to the Annotation and AnnotationAllSourceFiles classes, to get the size (number of values) for an annotation.
  • Added support for individual progress bars for annotators.
  • Added SourceAnnotationsAllSourceFiles class.

Changed

  • Significantly improved the CLI startup time.
  • Replaced the --verbose flag with --simple and made verbose the default mode.
  • Everything needed by Sparv modules (including utils) is now available through the sparv.api package.
  • Empty corpus config files are treated as missing config files.
  • Moved CWB corpus installer from korp module into cwb module. This lead to some name changes of variables used in the corpus config:
  • korp.remote_cwb_datadir is now called cwb.remote_data_dir
  • korp.remote_cwb_registry is now called cwb.remote_registry_dir
  • korp.remote_host has been split into korp.remote_host (host for SQL files) and cwb.remote_host (host for CWB files)
  • install target korp:install_corpus has been renamed and split into cwb:install_corpus and cwb:install_corpus_scrambled
  • Renamed the following stats exports:
  • stats_export:freq_list is now called stats_export:sbx_freq_list
  • stats_export:freq_list_simple is now called stats_export:sbx_freq_list_simple
  • stats_export:install_freq_list is now called stats_export:install_sbx_freq_list
  • stats_export:freq_list_fsv is now called stats_export:sbx_freq_list_fsv
  • Now incrementally compresses bz2 files in compressed XML export to avoid memory problems with large files.
  • Corpus source files are now called "source files" instead of "documents". Consequently, the --doc/-d flag has been renamed to --file/-f.
  • import.document_annotation has been renamed to import.text_annotation, and all references to "document" as a text unit have been changed to "text".
  • Minimum Python version is now 3.6.2.
  • Removed Python 2 dependency for hfst-SweNER.
  • Tweaked compound analysis to make it less slow and added option to disable using source text as lexicon.
  • cwb module now exports to regular export directory instead of CWB's own directories.
  • Removed ability to use absolute path for exports.
  • Renamed the installer xml_export:install_original to xml_export:install. The configuration variables xml_export.export_original_host and xml_export.export_original_path have been changed to xml_export.export_host and xml_export.export_path respectively. The configuration variables for the scrambled installer has been changed from xml_export.export_host and xml_export.export_path to xml_export.export_scrambled_host and xml_export.export_scrambled_path respectively.
  • Removed header_annotations configuration variable from export (it is still available as xml_export.header_annotations).
  • All export files must now be written to subdirectories, and each subdirectory must use the exporter's module name as prefix (or be equal to the module name).
  • Empty attributes are no longer included in the csv export.
  • When Sparv crashes due to unexpected errors, the traceback is now hidden from the user unless the --log debug argument is used.
  • If the -j/--cores option is used without an argument, all available CPU cores are used.
  • Importers are now required to write a source structure file.
  • CWB installation now also works locally.

Fixed

  • Fixed rule ambiguity problems (functions with an order higher than 1 were not accessible).
  • Automatically download correct Hunpos model depending on the Hunpos version installed.
  • Stanza can now handle tokens containing whitespaces.
  • Fixed a bug which lead to computing the source file list multiple times.
  • Fixed a few date related crashes in the cwb module.
  • Fixed installation of compressed, scrambled XML export.
  • Fixed bug in PunctuationTokenizer leading to orphaned tokens.
  • Fixed crash when scrambling nested spans by only scrambling the outermost ones.
  • Fixed crash in xml_import when no elements are imported.
  • Fixed crash on empty sentences in Stanza.
  • Better handling of empty XML elements in XML export.
  • Faulty custom modules now result in a warning instead of a crash.
  • Notify user when SweNER crashes.
  • Fixed crash when config file can't be read due to file permissions.
  • Fixed bug where geo:contextual would only work for sentences.
  • Fixed crash on systems with encodings other than UTF-8.

4.1.1 - 2021-09-20

Fixed

  • Workaround for bug in some versions of Python 3.8 and 3.9.
  • Fixed bugs in segmenter module.

4.1.0 - 2021-04-14

Added

  • New preload functionality for preloading annotators to speed up annotation process.
  • Added verbose mode for progress bar, showing all concurrently running tasks (by using the -v flag, mainly usable together with the -j flag for multiprocessing).
  • Ability to limit the number of parallel processes used by specific annotators.
  • Source document names are now shown in error messages.
  • Added exporter configuration to wizard.
  • Added several new configuration options for Stanza, and helpful error message to help mitigate memory problems.
  • An error message is now displayed when attempting to run annotations without input files.
  • Added new command (languages) to show a list of supported languages.
  • You can now refer to models outside the Sparv data dir.
  • Added importers section to sparv run-rule --list.
  • Class values inferred from annotation usage is now shown when running sparv classes.
  • Dry-running (sparv run -n) now shows a summary of tasks.

Changed

  • Improved progress bar. Shows number of tasks completed and left, instead of estimated time (which wasn't very helpful).
  • Slightly quicker startup time.
  • Malt and Stanza no longer perform dependency parsing on tokens not belonging to any sentences.
  • The build-models command no longer builds all models by default unless the --all flag is used.
  • Regular annotators used as custom_annotations are now configured using config instead of params.
  • Updated and improved documentation.

Fixed

  • Fixed broken combined XML export.
  • Fixed several problems with the Stanza module.
  • MySQL tables now support all unicode characters (by using the utf8mb4 charset).
  • Fixed support for retaining existing segments in segment module.
  • Fixed crash in SALDO module due to orphaned tokens.
  • Fixed unicode normalization in XML import module.
  • Removed broken unused models from build-models.
  • Fixed YAML syntax highlighting which was unreadable in some terminals.
  • Fixed rare TreeTagger crash.
  • Fixed some bugs in Stanford module.

4.0.0 - 2020-12-07

  • This version contains a complete make-over of the Sparv Pipeline!
  • Everything is written in Python now (no more Makefiles or bash code).
  • Increased platform independence

  • This facilitates creating new modules, debugging, and maintenance.

  • Easier installation process, Sparv is now on PyPI!

  • New plugin system facilitates installation of Sparv plugins (like FreeLing).

  • New format for corpus config files

  • The new format is yaml which is easier to write and more human-readable than makefiles.
  • There is a command-line wizard which helps you create corpus config files.

  • You no longer have to specify XML elements and attributes that should be kept from the original files. The XML parser now parses all existing elements and their attributes by default. Their original names will be kept and included in the export (unless you explicitly override this behaviour in the corpus config).

  • Improved interface

  • New command line interface with help messages
  • Better feedback with progress bar instead of illegible log output (log output is still available though)

  • More helpful error messages

  • New corpus import and export formats

  • Import of plain text files
  • Export to csv (a user-friendly, non-technical column format)
  • Export to (Språkbanken Text version of) CoNNL-U format

  • Export to corpus statistics (word frequency lists)

  • Updated models and tools for processing Swedish corpora

  • Sparv now uses Stanza with newly trained models and higher accuracy for POS-tagging and dependency parsing on Swedish texts.

  • Better support for annotating other (i.e. non-Swedish) languages

  • Integrated Stanford Parser for English analysis (POS-tags, baseforms, dependency parsing, named-entity recognition).
  • Added named-entity recognition for FreeLing languages.

  • If a language is supported by multiple annotation tools, you can now choose which tool to use.

  • Improved code modularity

  • Increased independence between modules and language models
  • This facilitates adding new annotation modules and import/export formats.