Unable to load the spacy model 'en_core_web_lg' on Google colab
I am using spacy in google colab to build an NER model for which I have downloaded the spaCy 'en_core_web_lg' model using
import spacy.cli
spacy.cli.download("en_core_web_lg")
and I get a message saying
✔ Download and installation successful
You can now load the model via spacy.load('en_core_web_lg')
However then when i try to load the model
nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_lg')
the following error is printed:
OSError: [E050] Can't find model 'en_core_web_lg'. It doesn't seem to be a shortcut link, a Python package or a valid path to a data directory.
Could anyone help me with this problem?
Answer
On colab using a Python 3 kernel, you should be all set with running in one cell (takes a while, but gives you visual feedback about progress, differently from spacy.cli)
!python -m spacy download en_core_web_lg
Then, *** restart the colab runtime *** !
(to do this in the colab menu, go for Runtime > Restart runtime...).
After that, executing
import spacy
nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_lg')
should work flawlessly (it still does for me in late 2020).