Textcat - teach to train.

[ryanwesslen]

hi @jdewsnip!

Can you run --textcat-multilabel but not --textcat? This is a known challenge due to the design (namely translating spaCy into Prodigy). As the error message includes, we typically recommend using --textcat-multilabel instead.

Alternatively, if you do want to use --textcat, I've written a script to convert the labels to run with --textcat instead:

textcat vs textcat_multilabel

Thanks for the background! I assume that you can run --textcat-multilabel, right? python -m prodigy train ebf/ --textcat-multilabel ebf_0,ebf_1,ebf_2 --eval-split 0.2 --base-model en_core_web_lg I definitely understand the point that this is a bit confusing (why would binary classification use a textcat_multilabel?) so maybe such a helper function could do the trick. As the thread above explains, some of this is due to how spaCy handles this and try to match up to it in Prodigy. A bit of a h…

I can understand this is a bit confusing (why use textcat-multilabel for a binary classifier?). Ines describes the design balancing act:

textcat vs textcat_multilabel

Yeah, I definitely see what you mean! This is how spaCy currently handles it so we tried to express that 1:1 in Prodigy. There's always this trade-off between handling stuff automatically under the hood and being a bit magical, and trying to be too clever / too magical and complicating things this way Like, an alternative would be to automatically use the textcat_multilabel component undert the hood if there's only one label but this can potentially lead to unintuitive results. Or …

I hope this helps and let us know if you have further questions!