Introduction to Pimlico

Motivation

It is becoming more and more common for conferences and journals in NLP and other computational areas to encourage, or even require, authors to make publicly available the code and data required to reproduce their reported results. It is now widely acknowledged that such practices lie at the center of open science and are essential to ensuring that research contributions are verifiable, extensible and useable in applications.

However, this requires extensive additional work. And, even when researchers do this, it is all too common for others to have to spend large amounts of time and effort preparing data, downloading and installing tools, configuring execution environments and picking through instructions and scripts before they can reproduce the original results, never mind apply the code to new datasets or build upon it in novel research.

Introducing Pimlico

Pimlico (Pipelined Modular Linguistic Corpus processing) addresses these problems. It allows users to write and run potentially complex processing pipelines, with the key goals of making it easy to:

  • clearly document what was done;
  • incorporate standard NLP and data-processing tasks with minimal effort;
  • integrate non-standard code, specific to the task at hand, into the same pipeline; and
  • distribute code for later reproduction or application to other datasets or experiments.

It comes with pre-defined module types to wrap a number of existing NLP toolkits (including non-Python code) and carry out many other common pre-processing or data manipulation tasks.

Building pipelines

Pimlico addresses the task of building of pipelines to process large datasets. It allows you to run one or several steps of processing at a time, with high-level control over how each step is run, manages the data produced by each step, and lets you observe these intermediate outputs. Pimlico provides simple, powerful tools to give this kind of control, without needing to write any code.

Developing a pipeline with Pimlico involves defining the structure of the pipeline itself in terms of modules to be executed, and connections between their inputs and outputs describing the flow of data.

Modules correspond to some data-processing code, with some parameters. They may be of a standard type, so-called core module types, for which code is provided as part of Pimlico.

A pipeline may also incorporate custom module types, for which metadata and data-processing code must be provided by the author.

Pipeline configuration

See Pipeline config for more on pipeline configuration.

At the heart of Pimlico is the concept of a pipeline configuration, defined by a configuration (or conf) file, which can be loaded and executed.

This specifies some general parameters and metadata regarding the pipeline and then a sequence of modules to be executed.

Each pipeline module is defined by a named section in the file, which specifies the module type, inputs to be read from the outputs of other, previous modules, and parameters.

For example, the following configuration section defines a module called split. Its type is the core Pimlico module type corpus split, which splits a corpus by documents into two randomly sampled subsets (as is typically done to produce training and test sets).

[split]
type=pimlico.modules.corpora.split
input=tokenized_corpus
set1_size=0.8

The option input specifies where the module’s only input comes from and refers by name to a module defined earlier in the pipeline whose output provides the data. The option set1_size tells the module to put 80% of documents into the first set and 20% in the second. Two outputs are produced, which can be referred to later in the pipeline as split.set1 and split.set2.

Input modules

The first module(s) of a pipeline have no inputs, but load datasets, with parameters to specify where the input data can be found on the filesystem.

A number of standard input readers are among Pimlico’s core module types to support reading of simple datasets, such as text files in a directory, and some standard input formats for data such as word embeddings. The toolkit also provides a factory to make it easy to define custom routines for reading other types of input data.

Module type

The type of a module is given as a fully qualified Python path to a Python package.

The package provides separately the module type’s metadata, referred to as its module info – input datatypes, options, etc. – and the code that is executed when it is run, the module executor. The example above uses one of Pimlico’s core module types.

A pipeline will usually also include non-standard module types, distributed together with the conf file. These are defined and used in exactly the same way as the core module types. Where custom module types are used, the pipeline conf file specifies a directory where the source code can be found.

See also

Full worked example

An example of a complete pipeline conf, using both core and custom module types

Datatypes

When a module is run, its output is stored ready for use by subsequent modules. Pimlico takes care of storing each module’s output in separate locations and providing the correct data as input.

The module info for a module type defines a datatype for each input and each output. Pimlico includes a system of datatypes for the datasets that are passed between modules.

When a pipeline is loaded, type-checking is performed on the connections between modules’ outputs and subsequent modules’ inputs to ensure that appropriate datatypes are provided.

For example, a module may require as one of its inputs a vocabulary, for which Pimlico provides a standard datatype. The pipeline will only be loaded if this input is connected to an output that supplies a compatible type. The supplying module does not need to define how to store a vocabulary, since the datatype defines the necessary routines for writing a vocabulary to disk. The subsequent module does not need to define how to read the data either, since the datatype takes care of that too, providing the module executor with suitable Python data structures.

Corpora

Often modules read and write corpora, consisting of a large number of documents. Pimlico provides a datatype for representing such corpora and a further type system for the types of the documents stored within a corpus (rather like Java’s generic types).

For example, a module may specify that it requires as input a corpus whose documents contain tokenized text. All tokenizer modules (of which there are several) provide output corpora with this document type. The corpus datatype takes care of reading and writing large corpora, preserving the order of documents, storing corpus metadata, and much more.

The datatype system is also extensible in custom code. As well as defining custom module types, a pipeline author may wish to define new datatypes to represent the data required as input to the modules or provided as output.

See also

IterableCorpus: datatype for corpora.

Running a pipeline

Pimlico provides a command-line interface for parsing and executing pipelines. The interface provides sub-commands to perform different operations relating to a given pipeline. The conf file defining the pipeline is always given as an argument and the first operation is therefore to parse the pipeline and check it for validity. We describe here a few of the most important sub-commands.

See also

Command-line interface

A complete list of the available commands

status

Outputs a list of all of the modules in the pipeline, reporting the execution status of each. This indicates whether the module has been run; if so, whether it completed successfully or failed; if not, whether it is ready to be run (i.e. all of its input data is available).

Each of the modules is numbered in the list, and this number can be used instead of the module’s full name in arguments to all sub-commands.

Given the name of a module, the command outputs a detailed report on the status of that module and its input and output datasets.

run

Executes a module.

An option --dry runs all pre-execution checks for the module, without running it. These include checking that required software is installed and performing automatic installation if not.

If all requirements are satisfied, the module will be executed, outputting its progress to the terminal and to module-specific log files. Output datasets are written to module-specific directories, ready to be used by subsequent modules later.

Multiple modules can be run in sequence, or even the entire pipeline. A switch --all-deps causes any unexecuted modules upon whose output the specified module(s) depend to be run.

browse

Inspects the data output by a module, stored in its pipeline-internal storage. Inspecting output data by loading the files output by the module would require knowledge of both the Pimlico data storage system and the specific storage formats used by the output datatypes. Instead, this command lets the user inspect the data from a given module (and a given output, if there are multiple).

Datatypes, as part of their definition, along with specification of storage format reading and writing, define how the data can be formatted for display. Multiple formatters may be defined, giving alternative ways to inspect the same data.

For some datatypes, browsing is as simple as outputting some statistics about the data, or a string representing its contents. For corpora, a document-by-document browser is provided, using the Urwid library. Furthermore, the definition of corpus document types determines how an individual document should be displayed in the corpus browser. For example, the tokenized text type shows each sentence on a separate line, with spaces between tokens.

Where next?

For a practical quick-start guide to building pipelines, see Super-quick Pimlico setup.

Or for a bit more detail, see Setting up a new project using Pimlico.