Installation¶

Rasa NLU itself doesn’t have any external requirements, but to do something useful with it you need to install & configure a backend. Which backend you want to use is up to you.

Setting up Rasa NLU¶

The recommended way to install Rasa NLU is using pip:

pip install rasa_nlu

If you want to use the bleeding edge version use github + setup.py:

git clone https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa_nlu.git
cd rasa_nlu
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

Rasa NLU allows you to use components to process your messages. E.g. there is a component for intent classification and there are several different components for entity recognition. The different components have their own requirements. To get you started quickly, this installation guide only installs the basic requirements, you may need to install other dependencies if you want to use certain components. When running Rasa NLU it will check if all required dependencies are installed and tell you if any are missing.

Note

If you want to make sure you have the dependencies installed for any component you might ever need, and you don’t mind the additional dependencies lying around, you can use

pip install -r alt_requirements/requirements_full.txt

to install everything.

Setting up a backend¶

Most of the processing pipeline you can use with rasa NLU either require spaCy, sklearn or MITIE to be installed.

Best for most: spaCy + sklearn¶

Rasa NLU can run with a choice of backends, but for most users a combination of spaCy and scikit-learn is the best option.

Installing spacy just requires (for more information visit the spacy docu):

pip install rasa_nlu[spacy]
python -m spacy download en_core_web_md
python -m spacy link en_core_web_md en

This will install Rasa NLU as well as spacy and its language model for the english language. We recommend using at least the “medium” sized models (_md) instead of the spacy’s default small en_core_web_sm model. Small models require less memory to run, but will somewhat reduce intent classification performance.

Note

Using spaCy as the backend for Rasa NLU is the preferred option. For most domains the performance is better or equally good as results achieved with MITIE. Additionally, it is easier to setup and faster to train. MITIE support has been deprecated as of version 0.12.

First Alternative: MITIE¶

The MITIE backend is all-inclusive, in the sense that it provides both the NLP and the ML parts.

pip install git+https://github.com/mit-nlp/MITIE.git
pip install rasa_nlu[mitie]

and then download the MITIE models. The file you need is total_word_feature_extractor.dat. Save this somewhere, if you want to use mitie, you need to tell it where to find this file.

The complete pipeline for mitie can be found here

language: "en"

pipeline:
- name: "nlp_mitie"
  model: "data/total_word_feature_extractor.dat"
- name: "tokenizer_mitie"
- name: "ner_mitie"
- name: "ner_synonyms"
- name: "intent_entity_featurizer_regex"
- name: "intent_classifier_mitie"

Warning

Training MITIE can be quite slow on datasets with more than a few intents. You can try

to use the sklearn + MITIE backend instead (which uses sklearn for the training) or

you can install our mitie fork which should reduce the training time as well.

Another Alternative: sklearn + MITIE¶

There is a third backend that combines the advantages of the two previous ones:

the fast and good intent classification from sklearn and
the good entitiy recognition and feature vector creation from MITIE

Especially, if you have a larger number of intents (more than 10), training intent classifiers with MITIE can take very long.

To use this backend you need to follow the instructions for installing both, sklearn and MITIE.

Example pipeline configuration for the use of MITIE together with sklearn:

language: "en"

pipeline:
- name: "nlp_mitie"
  model: "data/total_word_feature_extractor.dat"
- name: "tokenizer_mitie"
- name: "ner_mitie"
- name: "ner_synonyms"
- name: "intent_entity_featurizer_regex"
- name: "intent_featurizer_mitie"
- name: "intent_classifier_sklearn"